mistakenly concluded the girl was dead<\/a> and that it was appropriate to send rescuers by road, not air.<\/p>\nNew Zealand Professional Firefighters Union vice president Martin Campbell told Midday Report the problems ran wider than just the Hahei case.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think it is an isolated incident… I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately.”<\/p>\n
“I certainly know from personal experience being based at Auckland City where there is another lines rescue crew, we have faced delays in our ability to get to rescue incidents.”<\/p>\n
A law change was needed, and police and FENZ needed to agree on a better approach in the interim, he said.<\/p>\n
The FENZ call log from the Hahei rescue stated “police wont [sic] approve helo response because of the cost”.<\/p>\n
“This is the first I’ve actually specifically seen cost mentioned,” Campbell said. “Other issues I have seen [are] interagency squabbles as to who is actually in charge and who has the authority.”<\/p>\n
Comment has been requested from police and Police Minister Mark Mitchell.<\/p>\n
Emails among senior FENZ personnel immediately after the Hahei rescue referred to it as a “further instance” of line rescue crews being delayed due to police not approving an air ambulance helicopter.<\/p>\n
St John must get police approval to send a chopper to a non-injury emergency.<\/p>\n
FENZ national manager of response capability Ken Cooper in response to Campbell told RNZ on Thursday their standard operating procedure after a 111 call for rescue was to pass all information immediately on to police as the lead agency, who then coordinated the rescue.<\/p>\n
“It is also our practice to dispatch our resources immediately to the incident to assist,” Cooper said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“There are no communication challenges between our agencies, and we work well together.”<\/p>\n
The Hahei FENZ email trail showed Cooper was alerted on the Monday following the Saturday midnight rescue, and briefly replied that he would “prioritise a meeting with the relevant partner agencies this week with the intent on resolving the matter”.<\/p>\n
RNZ has lodged Official Information Act requests with police and FENZ to find out more.<\/p>\n
Hato Hone St John ran the air ambulance service under a contract with Health New Zealand. It said in cases where a person was not injured but required rescue, coordination and tasking was done by either of the country’s two recognised search and rescue coordinating authorities – police or the Rescue Coordination Centre.<\/p>\n
“The coordination of search and rescue operations requires specialist expertise to ensure both the person in need of rescue, and their rescuers are as safe as possible,” it said.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero, a daily newsletter<\/a> curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Only police can authorise an air ambulance under current rules. File photo. Photo: Supplied \/ Auckland Rescue Helicopter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[48,47,42,43,49,46,44,45,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-190259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-audio","tag-current-affairs","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}