What are lifelines?
Lifelines are the essential infrastructure and services that support the life of our community – utility services such as water, wastewater and stormwater, electricity, gas, telecommunications, and transportation networks including road, rail, airports and ports.

Are your staff and their families prepared?
Your staff are one of your most vital assets in an emergency. How prepared they and their families are will directly affect your businesses ability to respond to, and recover from, a civil defence emergency.

Encourage staff members to visit the Get Ready Get Thru website to find out how to get ready.
How to be prepared in your business for information on general business preparation for emergencies

Lifeline utilities and CDEM
The Director of the Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management has issued 'Director's Guidelines' pursuant to section 8(2)e of the Act to clarify the expectations of lifeline utilities under the Act - namely DGL 3/02 Lifeline Utilities & Emergency Management (pdf 430kB).
Supplementing the Director's Guidelines is a 'best practice guide' - BPG 1/03 Lifelines and CDEM Planning (PDF 1.4MB), developed in conjunction with the National Lifelines Coordinating Committee, that explains in detail how cooperative CDEM planning can occur between utilities and CDEM agencies.
Download Section 10. Lifeline utilities (pdf 380KB)

One of the requirements of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002 for Lifeline Utilities is that they establish planning and operational relationships with Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) Groups. At the heart of this relationship is for each Lifeline Utility to be able to exchange relevant information around their risk management processes and the key elements of their readiness and response arrangements. In the Best Practice Guide Lifelines and CDEM Planning, the concept of a Disaster Resilience Summary is introduced. This high-level summary is intended to provide information to CDEM Groups about each Lifeline Utility in the context of the CDEM Act 2002, and to assist the development of each region’s CDEM Group Operational Plan.

View the discussion paper on Improving Utility Disaster Resilience (doc 100kB) The Ministry welcomes comments or questions on the documents.

What is lifelines engineering?
Lifelines engineering is an informal, regionally-based process of lifeline utility representatives working with scientists, engineers and emergency managers to identify interdependencies and vulnerabilities to regional scale emergencies. This collaborative process provides a framework to enable integration of asset management, risk management and emergency management across utilities. Lifelines projects take an all-hazards approach. While there has been a traditional emphasis on natural hazard events, work is also encompassing other hazards such as the threat of pandemic.

The objectives of Lifelines engineering are to: reduce damage following a major disaster; and reduce the time lifeline utilities will take to restore their usual level of service after such an event.

The Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002 requires individual Lifeline Utilities to establish planning and operational relationships with CDEM Groups. Each Lifeline Utility must be able to support these groups by exchanging information about their risk management processes and their readiness and response arrangements. In many regions, this flow of information is facilitated by the Lifelines Group.

Get involved! National Exercise Programme
Lifeline Utility involvement in exercises is a crucial part of testing emergency plans and inter-agency communications. Exercises play a vital role in the process of developing local and national community resilience.

Learn more about CDEM Exercises

Engineering lifelines groups
Lifelines Groups are now established in virtually all regions of New Zealand. Most have informal relationships with regional Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) Groups, with some having specific agreed roles. The emphasis is on pre-event planning rather than taking a post-event operational role – in keeping with the essentially voluntary nature of Engineering Lifelines activities.

Funding is typically contributed by participating organisations; but usually only covers the cost of a co-ordinator/facilitator. Significant ‘in-kind’ contributions are made by participating utilities through their involvement in Lifeline Group activities.

One of the traditional outputs of a Lifelines Project or Group process is a list of physical mitigation targets across a region – with a focus on critical areas where many services may congregate (e.g. a major road bridge with other services attached). Some of these collective mitigation proposals are likely to have a higher priority when viewed from a regional perspective than in the individual asset owners’ asset management plans.

Lifelines Groups are also involved in readiness activities with outputs including maps of safe routes, priorities for disaster restoration and recommendations on emergency communications arrangements for lifeline utilities. The overall outcome is a much greater understanding of general vulnerabilities and interdependencies that individual utility response plans need to take into account.

All of the various outputs from a Lifelines Group provide valuable material for Emergency Managers at regional and local levels to better understand the region’s vulnerabilities, as well as being able to explain this to elements of the community, including the business sector, to assist with their planning.

As well as further developing the preparedness of lifelines operators for major hazard events, one of the key areas of emphasis is to create and maintain awareness of the importance of lifelines to the community at large. Lifelines work helps to portray a wider perspective of what major hazard events will mean for the community. For example, people react to the thought of being without water or sewage facilities for a week far more consciously than the threat of being injured by a damaged building in an earthquake.

View current lifelines groups
View information regarding the National Engineering Lifelines Committee

Key observations and outcomes
A number of key observations have come from the various Lifelines Project reports prepared over the past two decades, and the study tours following major overseas disaster events. These observations include:

Many utility and transportation assets have a high physical vulnerability to major natural hazard events, particularly those located in areas where permanent ground deformation could occur or situated in a floodplain;

All utilities have a critical dependency upon road access for impact assessment and repairs. Restoring priority access for other utilities (and their contractors and consultants) is therefore vital for the broader community recovery, along with communicating and exchanging access status.