Trust the government, they said

"How much confidence should the public have in authorities managing natural disasters? Not much, judging by the farcical way in which the civil defence emergence in Auckland has played out.
    "The way authorities dealt with Auckland’s extreme weather on Friday illustrated how hit-and-miss our civil defence emergency system is. In particular, the communications failures made the crisis much worse than it needed to be.... All central and government agencies did a very bad job of communicating with Aucklanders on Friday evening.
    "Auckland’s Emergency Management proved particularly unhelpful to the public during the chaos of Friday.... As for New Zealand’s civil defence mobile phone message warning system, this failed to kick in. It only issued warnings to Aucklanders’ phones on Sunday night – over 48 hours too late.
    "Increasingly, the bureaucracy is being blamed for the poor management of Auckland’s weather disaster.... [T]oo often the system can become bureaupathic, with rules and procedures becoming more important than producing the right outcomes. Officials themselves can become more driven by self-interest than by serving the public interest....
    "We saw on Friday night that one of the worst examples of this was when Waka Kotahi – the government agency tasked with roads – logged off early in the disaster, tweeting that they were finishing for the night about 7:30pm, and leaving road users to their own devices.
    "Of course, the blame can’t be all shifted to the bureaucracy – the Mayor himself has proven to be the worst communicator of all.... Today’s 'Herald' editorial points out that Brown will be remembered for his 'tone-deaf' defence on Friday night that 'my role isn’t to rush out with buckets.'
    "Although the mayor [and] emergency systems and authorities obviously didn’t create the disaster, they had a responsibility to mitigate its worse effects, which they did not do...."

~ Bryce Edwards, from his post 'How authorities failed Aucklanders in an emergency'