Thousands without power on Banks Peninsula, flooding in South Auckland
The region remains under a state of emergency, with evacuations, widespread flooding, slips, power cuts and pleas to conserve water.
However, a red heavy rain warning for Tasman district south-east of Motueka was lifted at 9pm Friday.
Earlier orange heavy rain warnings for Waikato, Coromandel Peninsula, Rotorua, Bay of Plenty, Mount Taranaki, Nelson city and Marlborough have also now expired.
MetService warned eastern Bay of Plenty and Tairāwhiti could see up to 90 millimetres of rain overnight, with a chance of being upgraded to a red rain warning.
RNZ is New Zealand's statutory civil defence lifeline radio broadcaster, providing vital information and updates as they come to hand.
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RNZ News
2 hours ago
- RNZ News
IAG's insurance profit rises as claims costs fall
IAG says New Zealand's weather conditions have been "relatively benign" in the past year. File photo. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly The country's biggest insurer IAG's full-year insurance profit has increased by a third as its margins and premium income rose, while claims costs fell. The Australian company, which operates the AMI, NZI and State insurance brands, delivered an insurance profit of A$606 million (NZ$664m) in the 12 months ended June, compared to A$457m ($501m) a year ago. In New Zealand dollar terms, gross written premium increased 1.7 percent to $4.17 billion, and its insurance margin was 27.4 percent, compared to 22.5 percent a year ago. IAG said homeowner premium rates increased by more than 10 percent as it increased prices, while private motor premium decreased slightly. Claims expenses were also down 3 percent to A$1.1b ($1.2b). The combined trans-Tasman business posted an after-tax profit of $A1.36b ($1.49b), up 51 percent from a year ago. Commenting on the overall result, chief executive Nick Hawkins said the company had strong momentum throughout the year. "By delivering on our strategy and investing for growth, we can execute at scale and are set to protect significantly more Australians and New Zealanders," he said. "This year, Australia experienced weather conditions broadly in line with expectations, while New Zealand was relatively benign," he said. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Newsroom
12 hours ago
- Newsroom
We strangled our rivers; now they're fighting back
The Motueka River had been rising for hours by the time a state of emergency was declared for the Nelson Tasman region at 10.13am on June 27. Already, it had risen above 5m, well over its normal height of around 1m. But the worst was yet to come. By 5.15pm, a biblical torrent of water was pouring down the river – more than an Olympic swimming pool every second. In the 48 hours after the state of emergency was declared, 190 million cubic metres of water flooded through the Motueka River, enough to cover the entire city of Nelson in more than 3m of water. And that's only the water that was measured in the river – because, like many other rivers throughout Nelson Tasman in that June superstorm, the Motueka breached stop banks at numerous locations, flooding farmland, homes and businesses and swamping roads, power lines and other critical infrastructure. As locals pick up the pieces, much of the discussion and the news coverage has focused on the damage caused by forestry blocks swept by the rainfall into people's homes, or the sheer deluge of water dumped by the storm on Nelson Tasman. It was a one-in-100 year flood said some, one-in-150 years others said. There's an awareness that these labels are less meaningful than they might have once been, because the changing climate is rendering what might have once been a once-a-century weather event into something that happens every generation, or decade – or perhaps in the future, an everyday storm. There's another contributor to the damage here too, which has received far less attention. Yes, the damage from forestry is real and obvious. Yes, climate change is playing a greater and greater role in superstorms and epic floods. Conventional science indicates that for every degree the atmosphere warms, it can hold 7 percent more water, though researchers troublingly concluded last year that this might be a global average and that extreme rainfall could be 14 to 21 percent more intense for each degree of warming instead. Perhaps the greatest cause of the devastation in Nelson Tasman, and in many similar flood events across the country and particularly the South Island in recent years, is where we've decided to build: River plains. When, after the thunderclouds had receded, Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell hopped in a helicopter to survey the damage at the top of Te Waipounamu, a pool photographer and videographer went with him. Footage: Pool/RNZ/Samantha Gee The images were published in outlets across the country. They showed the floodwaters still blanketing fields and homes; the rivers winding well beyond their usual, constrained banks. To many, the pictures showed something unnatural – a freak of nature, rivers where they weren't supposed to be. To a smaller cohort of planners, engineers and ecologists, the images were signs of the obvious: Braided rivers. Strangled rivers Another name for braided rivers is wandering rivers. Before Europeans arrived in Aotearoa, many of the country's rivers really did wander. Shaun McCracken is the engineering lead at Environment Canterbury, charged with looking after flood protection and land drainage. He was in charge of Canterbury's recovery from the devastating 2021 floods which – as with Nelson Tasman – saw significant damage from braided rivers breaching their banks. 'The water comes out of the foothills or the mountains onto the floodplains. Left to their own devices, in a Canterbury context pretty much all our rivers have a hinge point on them somewhere where they effectively are an alluvial fan, and the river would migrate north and south across the Canterbury plains. That's how the Canterbury plains were formed,' he explains. New Zealand's braided rivers are concentrated in the South Island Take the Waimakariri as an example. Before Europeans arrived, it wandered back and forth across the plains, sometimes exiting a little north of its present mouth and sometimes meeting the sea 60km south at Lake Ellesmere. From one perspective, all the land between those two points – including the city of Christchurch – sits in the Waimakariri's riverbed. That's quite different from something like the Waikato River, which has stuck to its current basin for the past 21,000 years. It's also very different from the rivers Europeans were used to back home, says Sonny Whitelaw, the manager of braided rivers ecosystem restoration group BRaid. 'The moment Europeans arrived, they went, 'Right, okay, we will now control these rivers, just like we've done in Europe'. That's a process that's taken a very long time, it didn't happen overnight,' she says. 'There's a lot of hubris behind it in the sense that you've engineered to mitigate flood risks on the assumption that what you're doing will not just mitigate the risk, but prevent the risk. There's often a misunderstanding from people that this is a guaranteed prevention.' In other words, we strangled the rivers. A river which might have roamed 60km back and forth across the Canterbury plains over the centuries has been funnelled into a narrow channel just a few hundred metres wide. Then, we looked at the big, flat, fertile plains left behind and decided to start farming them. Development of braided river plains is not new, but in many places it has kept pace or even accelerated in recent decades, even as we've come to understand that these areas are and always will be prone to flooding. Aimee Calkin is a hydrologist who last year completed her master's degree, writing a thesis which looked at intensification in braided riverbeds since 1990. 'It showed significant land use intensification in the South Island and particularly around Canterbury. We saw intensive land use tripling during this period, particularly in the Waimakariri River and we were seeing a pattern of agricultural development and urban encroachment,' she says. The Rangitata River saw significant intensification between 1990 and 2020 Calkin found the amount of highly intensified land in braided riverbeds tripled to 46,000ha in Marlborough between 1990 and 2020. In Nelson region, the increase was smaller, just 10 percent, though the amount of effectively untouched land dropped by a quarter. Legacy risk All this intensification has two big effects. First, the confinement of the rivers means much greater water flow in big rainfall events. 'It's like narrowing a pipe, you're going to have a lot higher velocity, trying to channel the same amount of water into a much more confined area,' Whitelaw says. 'We've built all this infrastructure to protect our stuff and it's just not adequate anymore.' Importantly, braided riverbeds don't just describe the extent of a river's historic wandering, but also its potential floodplain when it rains a lot. The floodplains are designed to spread out the water, lessening the torrent in any one place, but when the water is walled off from those plains, it looks more like the Motueka in June – measured in swimming pools per second rather than cubic metres per second. Of course, those greater flows increase the risk of a stop bank breaking. They also raise the water levels, sometimes overtopping whatever flood protections have been built. Then we see the second problem. One the bank breaks or the river overflows, the water returns to its historic paths, winding throughout the braided riverbed. Which is exactly where we've placed some of our prime farmland, not to mention homes, businesses and critical infrastructure. In June 2019, Niwa scientists estimated 675,000 people live in fluvial (river) and pluvial (rainfall) flood hazard areas. While these extend beyond braided rivers, they exclude coastal flooding areas and the results were heavily weighted towards Canterbury, where 64 percent of New Zealand's braided rivers are located. The total replacement cost of the buildings in these hazard zones, in 2016 dollars, was $135 billion. For Canterbury alone, the bill topped $40 billion. Nearly 20,000km of roads are in flood zones, along with 1600km of rail and 20 airports. Electricity infrastructure is also exposed: 3400km of transmission lines, 8800 pylons and other structures and 49 substations. Plus 21,000km of three waters pipes. Of the 2.1 million hectares of land covered by the study, three quarters was agricultural, a quarter was natural or undeveloped and just under 2 percent was built environment. A more recent report, prepared to inform the Government's independent reference group on climate adaptation, found between 2200 and 13,500 properties worth $1.8b to $12.2b in inland flood zones are expected to be damaged by at least one flood event by 2060. About a third of this is due to the changing climate while the remainder is a result of existing flood risk. 'Now we're faced with the problem that we have put all our stuff in the way of these rivers and we expect to keep all our stuff protected, whether its farms or cities or houses,' Whitelaw says. 'But we don't have the drainage capacity. We don't have high enough levees, and even then, the levees are made of, often, gravel and a few sticks of pine trees and willows and what have you. To think that some of these floods are just going to say, 'Oh, yes, we'll keep within our bounds' is just impractical.' Farmland constrained the Ōtaki River in Wellington This is a slow-rolling crisis. We won't wake up one day and find the whole country under water. But we will – already are, in fact – waking up to find one part of the country is under water. And then while we're recovering from that, somewhere else floods. And by the time we finally fix up the first one, it gets wiped out yet again. 'What we're faced with is some not-so-good land use planning over many, many decades, and over many, many governments and many, many local authorities all over the country,' Professor Jonathan Boston, chair of the Victoria University School of Government and an expert on climate adaptation, says. 'Substantial numbers of people live in towns and cities that are essentially on floodplains or former wetlands or very close to the coast which is where they're going to be vulnerable to sea-level rise. What we have, in effect, is a substantial amount of what is called legacy risk. That legacy risk is not going away anytime soon, unless people are moved out of harm's way – and it is bound to grow because more areas are going to be vulnerable to severe weather events, storm surges and eventual inundation from sea level.' And there's a nasty irony in all of this too: The very reason why this land is so valuable, particularly for agriculture, is the same reason it is so vulnerable and exposed to flooding, which is that it's literally a riverbed. Tasman after the June floods. Footage: Pool/RNZ/Samantha Gee The Canterbury plains were built, as McCracken says, by these braided river systems. They delivered sediment across the region, eroding what was there before, flattening it out, fertilising the soil. 'We've stopped those rivers from delivering all that sediment to our land,' Whitelaw says. 'Except that when they do deliver it, the people who are on that land understandably say, 'Oh my God, put the river back where it belongs. Look at all this silt that we've got killing our orchards.' But those orchards depended on that silt, on that river, in the first place. It's a conundrum.' Where a river starts The first step is to stop the problem from getting any worse than it already is. That's something basically everyone agrees on: We need to stop building in places that we know are going to flood. All parties in Parliament, for example, are nominally on board with the idea of no further development in flood-prone areas. The independent report on climate adaptation clearly stated that development in high-risk areas 'should be avoided'. But there's a perception that government policy isn't aligned with the rhetoric. 'We can stop development, if we're prepared to, in areas that are likely to be at risk or high risk over coming decades and indeed beyond,' Boston says. 'But there's a political economy problem with stopping development, particularly in a context where you have a Government that's keen for development to occur, where there may be limited flat land, where you've got developers who have deep pockets who can challenge councils which might be reluctant to let them develop in particular areas; and where you have people who are willing to take risks and insurers who are prepared to insure, at least in the short term.' Right now, there's also a legal problem. It's obviously not legal to build a house or a farm in a riverbed without a consent. In theory, that prohibition could go a long way towards stopping new, risky development. In reality, however, it falls short because of how we define a riverbed. 'This is where we saw a bit of a disconnect between the scientific understanding and legal definitions of braided rivers,' says Calkin. 'There were cases where the law was saying bank-to-bank where the river is at its fullest flow, but a braided river is not often at its fullest flow.' As written, some argue the law should view vast swathes of the Canterbury plains as situated in riverbeds. But it has been interpreted differently, allowing development right up to the banks of where the strangled rivers trickle in the dry season. 'If we don't have any changes to those legislative definitions or management practices, then we're just going to see the impacts of flooding worsen in those areas where we've got that development pressure going on,' Calkin believes. The previous Labour government's replacement legislation for the Resource Management Act, the Natural and Built Environments Act, did exactly this – adopting a new definition of riverbed for braided rivers in particular, after pressure from a group of scientists, including Calkin. When the new coalition Government came to power, however, one of its first acts was to repeal the replacement legislation and reinstate the RMA. The Government is now working on its own RMA replacement, but as Boston argues, its development focus may mean lesser protections for braided river plains. There are non-governmental factors at play here too. While councils and central government may be slow to act, that's not the case for banks and insurers which are growing increasingly leery of covering properties in high-risk areas. Lack of insurance cover (and, subsequently, lack of mortgage availability) could certainly pump the breaks on development in braid plains. But insurers and banks aren't just looking at new properties, they're turning their gaze onto existing infrastructure as well. Skyrocketing insurance premiums and risk-averse banks have been among the first signs of a growing recognition of what Boston called 'legacy risk'. That is, the increased risk to existing properties and infrastructure both from new understandings of the danger of certain areas and from the changing climate. What can actually be done about this legacy risk? McCracken says one way to figure that out is the 'PARA' approach: Protect, Accommodate, Retreat or Avoid the hazard. 'There's a certain amount of hubris, or engineering hubris, behind it, to think that we can control everything in nature' Sonny Whitelaw At a council level, managing this legacy risk is done in large part by engineers like McCracken, who use the 'PARA' approach: Protect, accommodate, retreat or avoid the hazard. 'Protect is your traditional engineered methods, whether it be a stop bank or a wall or managing the bed level. Accommodate is a really important element of the four. That's where we end up a lot of the time – emergency services, flood warning, insurance industry, all those other bits which fill the gap between what can be protected against and the residual risk that's left over,' he says. 'Avoiding the hazard is recognising it early enough and not putting something of consequence in the way of the floodwater. Retreat is the corollary of that – if we do recognise that there's something that's built in a hazardous zone then we can move it out of the way, though there's costs associated with that.' Avoid prevents the legacy risk from arising in the first place. Protect and accommodate go hand-in-hand – protections won't eliminate all risk, and additional measures are needed in addition to a stop bank or willow planting. Then, if protect and accommodate become impossible or too expensive, you look to retreat. Boston has a similar series of options in mind for legacy risk. 'There are broadly three possible kinds of scenarios there. In some cases, you might be able to protect to a greater extent than currently by investing in higher and better stop banks and seawalls and other defensive structures, and also using nature-based solutions. Unfortunately, those things tend to cost money and they're not always cost effective and in some cases, they're not technically feasible,' he says. 'Option two is moving people out of harm's way, whatever you want to call it – planned relocation, managed retreat, transformative adaptation. That of course involves cost and if you want to do it preemptively, then the burden falls predominately on taxpayers, ratepayers and property owners rather than insurers. The third option is you basically let things pan out as they will. Hands off.' Fixing flooding Let's start with protection. This is the bread and butter of climate adaptation and flood management. In the vast majority of risk scenarios across New Zealand, we'll be looking to protection, not managed retreat. McCracken says that's just as much an option in braided river plains too. 'There's always going to be a way to engineer up to whatever standard you like. If we look to Canterbury, we've got levels of protection, if we're talking about a frequency of flooding, we've got flood protection schemes which are designed for everywhere from a one-in-20 year flood up to a 500-year frequency of flooding,' he says. 'We can benchmark that against some of the standards in the Building Act, like floor levels above 50-year. A lot of the regional policy statements around the country now are starting to refer to around a 200-year frequency.' McCracken worked on the response to the 2021 Canterbury floods. Photo: David Williams McCracken recalls speaking with a Dutch engineer who told him: 'We're designing it so that we don't flood'. That's possible and may make sense for some contexts, like the densely populated Netherlands, but it comes at a price. How you actually pay for the protections is another headache. 'The current system in terms of decisions to invest in protection are largely a balance of the level of protection that can be provided, the frequency or infrequency of flooding and the affordability. All this work is funded through local government at the moment, so through rates,' McCracken says. 'The major lever that councils have to pull to generate that income is a targeted rates against the properties who are affected. That's either a really elegant or a really ugly solution, depending on how you want to view it. Elegant in that the properties that are directly affected have direct input into the amount they are willing to contribute for the protection they receive, but really ugly in that if the community you're protecting is either of a lower socioeconomic background or a really small pool of people that can't generate enough income to provide an appropriate level of protection, then you end up with different levels of protection all over the country.' Westport, here, is a good example – undeniably exposed to severe flood risks, but with too small and poor a rating base to pay either for robust protections or relocating the town. In that case as in some others, central government has stepped in, but the ad hoc nature of this investment support still risks uneven outcomes for different communities. 'When people say we can't afford to move people out of harm's way, when protective structures aren't cost effective, the question is, what are the costs of not moving people out of harm's way?' Jonathan Boston Then there are those who say protection, at least in is a bit of a red herring. Whitelaw points to a report commissioned by Christchurch City Council in 2023 which found 'it is not possible to 'fix flooding' and some level of flood risk would be present even if investment were significantly increased. There will always be a bigger flood event, or areas that cannot be practicably remedied.' 'I did geography in school and the first thing we learned was that river floodplains, that's where you put all your agriculture, because that's where all the good stuff is, but you never build your houses on them. It was land that everybody understood would be periodically flooded,' Whitelaw says. 'But suddenly that land has been converted into homes and critical infrastructure and all kinds of stuff. I do think there's a certain amount of hubris, or engineering hubris, behind it, to think that we can control everything in nature.' McCracken says that perspective hasn't necessarily been lost. He spoke to a farmer after the 2021 Canterbury floods, who pointed to a field and said, 'Shaun, these paddocks, I know the water is going to come through here from time to time. I just don't want it to stay here forever. So if you can do something about that, that'd be good, yeah?' That's 'realistic', McCracken says. 'Rural land or even some sort of urban parkland, or gold courses, if they go under water once every 10 years and there's no major damage, that's quite appropriate use of that land. But if lives are in danger through the use of that land, then that's something different.' Managed retreat What do you do, then, when housing or transmission lines or three waters pipes are sitting in a flood zone which is too expensive to protect with stop banks? You think about moving. Managed retreat, in which communities on the front lines of the climate crisis are moved wholesale to a safer location, is the bane of climate policymakers. As with stopping development in high-risk zones, it enjoys widespread support across the political spectrum – everyone agrees it will be needed. That's where the agreement stops. Up in the air still is who will need it and when, how to actually do it and, most importantly of all, how to pay for it. The cost of managed retreat even where we know it's likely to be at least partially required (Westport, South Dunedin, potentially parts of post-Gabrielle Hawkes Bay) would already represent a significant strain on central government's books. Generations of policymakers have therefore sought to kick the can down the road or shift the burden to someone else, leaving us no further along than when we first recognised the need to begin to adapt to climate impacts decades ago. Some Westport residents have adopted their own flood protections. Photo: Marc Daalder 'We had a dearth of proper political leadership at the national level over multiple governments in relation to the risks New Zealand faces from climate change. Politicians across the political spectrum have been unwilling to basically tell the public what is going to be happening over the coming 50 to 100 years and the fact that tens of thousands of people are going to have to move, either voluntarily or compulsorily, int the face of sea-level rise and more severe riverine and pluvial flooding,' Boston says. 'Politicians have been reluctant to say this because there are no brownie points for politicians in saying this. It's a lose-lose situation.' The latest stop on the adaptation policy merry-go-round is the July report from the Government's Independent Reference Group on Climate Adaptation, which proposes no further buyouts of devastated properties beginning in 20 years' time. Buyouts are an important component of managed retreat. In theory, it would be nice to proactively move people out of high-risk zones. But it is often in the aftermath of a disaster, like Cyclone Gabrielle or the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, that managed retreat occurs when the government buys out property owners and they relocate somewhere else. The Independent Reference Group's recommendation, therefore, is for a transition over 20 years from managed retreat to something more like Boston's third option: Hands off. 'When people say we can't afford to move people out of harm's way, when protective structures aren't cost effective, the question is, what are the costs of not moving people out of harm's way?' Boston says. 'Assuming we remain a civilised society, then there will be very significant public costs associated with that, because you'll have to go and rescue people, all the emergency response costs. Then there's the recovery costs, which of course affect not just individual properties but also all the infrastructure that gets damaged: bridges, roads, water services, electricity systems and so on.' Boston's view is that the social costs of leaving people to fend for themselves will far outweigh the social costs of managed retreat, and that quite possibly the impact on the government's balance sheet will be greater as well. And yet, there is clearly an appetite among politicians to put an end to the ad hoc system of buyouts after natural disasters. 'In principle the government won't be able to keep bailing out people in this way,' Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said in mid-July, reacting to a second surge of flooding in Tasman. 'This is a long-term issue. We need a proper framework in place to work out whether its landowners, councils, whether its central government, banks, insurers that actually have to create a framework for dealing with these weather events and how we handle them going forward.' Motueka Estuary after June's floods. Photo: Pool/RNZ/Samantha Gee What might that look like? Boston points to a report he helped write for the previous government, which recommended proactive, planned relocation, compensating people based on various principles (such as compensation for those who lose their main home but not their bach), with compensation per property for fairness and funded primarily by central government. However, that last line at least is unlikely to be palatable to Luxon and the rest of the current coalition. And Labour didn't do much to highlight or back Boston's report when it landed two months out from the 2023 election either. 'We need to do our very, very best to reach a cross-party agreement on a principled approach to sharing the costs that climate change will generate over multiple generations. But it will require leadership from all the political parties to recognise what is at stake and to be willing to reach some kind of compromise where probably no one will feel completely comfortable,' Boston says. In the absence of that, Whitelaw says, 'we're stuck in this constant state of lowest common denominator of: We'll just do nothing'. These are not new conversations. And to some extent, they are well developed in some places around the country, even if there is no consensus on the details at a national level. But Whitelaw believes these discussions are farthest along in coastal communities facing the certain threat of sea-level rise, rather than those living on floodplains. 'That's happening around Aotearoa. We've got people in coastal areas going through those staged processes now. There's still the unfortunate perception that the same doesn't apply to rivers,' she says. Making room for the river What if we did all come to our senses and work something out? What would it look like to stop strangling the rivers and instead find a way to coexist with them? Whitelaw has plenty of ideas. They aren't hers alone, though. Throughout the country and across the globe, communities are turning to nature-based solutions to natural hazards, including river flooding. Stop banks may fail, but these natural protections can be more robust. They're just not well suited to slotting in to our existing land uses. You can't, for example, replace a flood wall with a wetland. The latter takes up more space, meaning a mix of McCracken's protection and accommodation and retreat (to make room for the first two) will be needed. 'If we give these rivers more room to move, it will be good for everyone, because it'll be a wider space for those large water flows to go down, we can create buffers, we can protect people and nature,' she says. 'If we can restore wetlands and understand that there are periods when they will 'flood', that's their role. That's their function. That's why they work so well. They act like kidneys as well, they clean up the waterways.' Photo: BRaid Right now, it feels like 'pie-in-the-sky stuff', Whitelaw says, but if the most vulnerable areas could be bought out and returned to nature, that could protect everyone else much more effectively. 'If we could start converting some of those areas into wetlands to take up some of the slack and then widen the rivers here and there, then we may delay the worst of the impacts. It's just common sense, it's like more water in the pipe.' She can easily envisage a happy ending, but she struggles to see how we get there. 'So your story won't have a nice ending, unfortunately,' she tells me. In the absence of a clear pathway to the happy ending, Whitelaw feels like we're locking in the worst ending. It's a view shared by Boston too. 'The opposite of managed retreat will be unmanaged retreat and the likelihood is that unplanned, unmanaged retreat will be very, very disruptive, costly, damaging for society as a whole,' he says. Or, as Whitelaw puts it: 'It's like being diagnosed with something that's not incurable, but you can ignore it and it kills you or you can decide to do something about it. 'The bottom line is, if we don't do it ourselves, the rivers will do it for us.'
RNZ News
12 hours ago
- RNZ News
Past the point of safe return, nowhere to go but Antarctica
Flight Lieutenant Ben Pickering (left) and Squadran Leader Adam Palmer (right) Photo: Davina Zimmer Just two hours into a dangerous rescue mission to Antarctica , the crew on board the Royal New Zealand Defence Force super hercules hit their first snag. They were told that Christchurch, the designated airport they would divert to if they had to turn around, was too risky for landing. Freezing fog had already ruled out Invercargill and Dunedin, and now Christchurch. Next on the list was Wellington. But Wellington's runway was closed for maintenance. Today The Detail hears how the sole job of one of the two co-pilots on board was to keep watch on the ever-changing, unpredictable weather and find a new destination for the emergency turnaround. The closed runway problem was sorted, but not before the mission leader got involved from Christchurch and phone calls were made. It was one of many risks that had to be weighed up against the purpose of the mission - saving a life. Defence got the call for help from the US National Science Foundation at McMurdo Station to pick up one person who needed urgent medical care, and two others who were also ill. Squadron leader Adam Palmer was in charge of the mission - his first time in the lead - and watched every moment on his laptop from Christchurch. He says that the dangers rescuers face could be "any number of things". The NZDF's C-130J-30 Super Hercules. Photo: Davina Zimmer "We talk about almost a perfect triangle. You need the aircraft to play the game, the weather in Antarctica to be good, the weather in New Zealand to be good, as well as the weather en route." But the greatest danger is that the rescue plane goes beyond the point of safe return and the weather turns bad. The crew took off from Christchurch knowing the weather was not looking good for landing at Phoenix Airfield at McMurdo Station. "Initially there were reports that there was going to be snow and big reductions in visibility," co-pilot flight lieutenant Ben Pickering says. The weather forecast kept changing on the flight down but in a positive way, he says, and the poor conditions initially predicted on the runway never eventuated. From their airbase at Whenuapai, Palmer and Pickering explain the preparations and planning that took place in the five days from the first call to the defence force for help, to take off from Christchurch. Even though a patient was seriously ill, Palmer says a number of things had to be put in place to minimise the risk, including creating a runway at McMurdo to make landing safe. "Because it is winter at the moment they haven't maintained the runway to the standard they normally would during the summer season," he says. A team from the US base had to clear excess snow, groom and compact the 10,000 foot runway. In its message of praise for the "heroic" mission, the US Embassy says it was a feat that took precision and extraordinary skill. In typical low-key fashion, Pickering describes the landing by captain Andrew Sledger as "good". Pickering says night vision goggles were used for much of the flight but the clarity of the airfield meant they could remove them for landing - but that in itself was a danger. "When you take the goggles off suddenly there is no terrain definition. So you get this effect called the black hole effect where if you can imagine the outline of a runway lit up and there's just absolutely nothing around it except for darkness, it just feels like you're floating in space and it can cause some optical illustions where you feel like you're low." Despite the safe landing, there were more risks to come, including "hot refuelling" the plane in minus 30 degrees Celsius while the patients were loaded on board. The US Embassy says the NZDF delivered on a mission that was "nothing short of heroic" and that tested "every ounce of skill and bravery". Palmer says it is the riskiest operation he has overseen but also "massively rewarding". "Having had the J (hercules) for 11 months to now go and do this is awesome for the team." Pickering says it is the toughest real-life mission of his career so far. "When you see the pictures of us landing - from the outside - onto the runway, it would be a pretty significant moment if you needed to leave Antarctica seeing a 730 land ready to pick you up. For me that was pretty cool." Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here . You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter .
