Last Saturday 7th December, our Christchurch City Council teams joined the community at 23 AFFIRM on Wainoni Park.

Our stall brought together the Gear Up Ōtautahi, Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) and the Resource Recovery team in the Health and Wellbeing marque alongside numerous other community stalls.

Gear Up Ōtautahi is a Christchurch City Council initiative which takes donations from the community of good quality sports equipment, shoes and boots and redistribute it to reduce barriers to participation and support health and well-being.

We know that sports and play not only bring communities together but also provide psychological support before and during emergencies. This made Gear Up a perfect fit for discussions about emergency preparedness.

At our stall, we emphasised the need for families to create a preparedness plan and put together a grab bag. Key considerations for the plan included:

• Storing essential items like water, food, and medications at home, in the car, and in the grab bag.
• Establishing family contact details and a meeting point.
• Planning for scenarios such as:
  • If there’s no power, what will you do?
  • If there’s no water, what will you do?
  • If you need to leave in a hurry, what will you do?
• Mapping out your family’s evacuation route and getting to know neighbours.

Aranui is located within a tsunami zone. If a local source tsunami were triggered—such as one caused generated by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Hikurangi subduction zone—the community would have less than an hour to evacuate. This makes knowing the warning signals, understanding alert messages, and taking immediate action absolutely lifesaving.

We provided free pamphlets, templates, tote bags, and torches to help families get started—or update their preparedness plans. Many attendees shared that while they had put together emergency kits after the Christchurch earthquakes, those kits had been sitting untouched for years. Our stall served as a timely reminder, motivating them to revisit their emergency preparedness and adapt their plans to reflect changes in their lives. For example, individuals who were teenagers during the earthquakes, now parents, recognised the importance of establishing family meeting points.

We were delighted to see so many families engaging with these critical conversations. Events like AFFIRM highlight the power of community connection in building resilience.

The Resource Recovery stall had conversations with people about the alternative recycling schemes to divert waste from the red bin to free up capacity. We ran a bin sorting game which was extremely popular with children, which showed that their bin sorting knowledge was very good.