PETER WILLIAMS: When a system fails

It’s time someone is made accountable

Here’s a question. If an organisation experiences “systemic failure” isn’t it the responsibility of the person who oversees that system to take the blame for the failure?

Therefore when Tauranga City Council has systemic failure, isn’t it ultimately the fault of the Chief Executive?

After all, he was the one who installed and supposedly oversaw those systems. Ergo, they fail so the buck must stop with the CEO.

So far Marty Grenfell, ex cop and CEO at TCC since 2018, is staying staunch. The Davison report into the January 22 landslide at Mt Maunganui was damning of the TCC.

It was somebody’s fault that campers were not evacuated from the holiday park on that fateful morning. The CEO wasn’t the direct responder during that horrendous rain storm the night before of course, but he had ultimate oversight of those who ran the holiday park.

I like to think I know a bit more about that terrible tragedy than most. I was in the Mount on holiday on January 22. I was also there the night of January 21 and had dinner in Mount Main Street while the heaviest rain I’ve ever known just kept coming down incessantly for the two hours or so we were in the restaurant.

In previous times I lived in the Mount too, 8 floors up in an apartment on the corner of Marine Parade and the now closed Adams Avenue. Our lounge and balcony looked out over the camping ground and the hot pools.

I’ve walked to the top and around the Mount countless times. Over the ten years or so I lived there I came to realise that if it rained heavily the tracks would be closed because of slips.

It doesn’t take a geologist to understand why. The Mount is steep, and comprises basically gooey volcanic clay with not a lot to hold it together, especially on the lower slopes.

The morning after that horrendous torrential rain (a month’s worth in 24 hours I heard in one report) my wife and I and a friend set out to walk around the Mount, hoping that some part of the base track might be open. The Main Beach end was closed so we walked from the surf club through the camping ground to the Pilot Bay or harbour end of the track to find it closed there as well.

But here’s the scary bit. We were through that camping ground at around 9.10 am. We walked past the hot pools and the toilet block that was consumed by the slip only 20 minutes later.

As we walked we could see streams of water running from the steep hillside. One small blue tent was hard against the bottom of the slope with a pile of mud already having slid onto its back flap.

The place was a mess. But campers were soaked from the downpour the night before so were more interested in drying out their stuff rather than leaving - which they should have been told to do.

The Davison report has identified the danger of the steep slopes above the camping ground following heavy rain. Those warnings were issued as far back as 1999 and had been repeated regularly, most recently in June of last year.

A system that gets such reports should be robust enough to ensure all the appropriate people know of the danger and how to manage it.

For the CEO to now claim systemic failure is a hopeless cop out. His systems should have ensured those reports of potential danger were known at all levels of TCC management.

Marty Grenfell may have survived in his job so far by claiming it wasn’t his fault that campers weren’t evacuated.

But that’s just one report. There are more to come and after the way Worksafe hounded former Ports of Auckland CEO Tony Gibson following the death of a stevedore, it’s hard to see how Marty Grenfell can escape a Worksafe prosecution for not properly managing the operation of the council owned camping ground where six people died.

For now Mr Grenfell’s reaction is just so typical of this country’s officialdom after a terrible tragedy.

At Cave Creek a politician resigned over a year later but the CEO of the Conservation Department didn’t.

At Pike River, nobody in the company was ever charged despite 29 men being killed.

When will we have a day when someone admits accountability and responsibility for a failure of a system and the breakdown of a health and safety policy?

Marty Grenfell could set a precedent for public accountability in this country. Instead he’s vowing to do better next time.

Not good enough.

Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Subscribe to Peter William's Substack here