Schools across the region are now better prepared to cope in an emergency thanks to the first tranche of emergency radios have been rolled out by Tairāwhiti Emergency Management.

Group manager Ben Green says first to receive the radios are 28 schools that face the biggest risk because they sit within tsunami or flood zones, but eventually all schools, early childhood centres and kura kaupapa will all have radios.

“It is part of the preparedness and resilience training we have been rolling out through our communities over the past two years,” said Mr Green.

The need for the Emergency Radios in Schools Programme was highlighted when the TEMO team accompanied Awapuni School’s evacuation hikoi. It was quickly identified that the challenge for teachers and kaimahi trying to move large groups of children was the inability to communicate with one another. Providing radios for teachers to communicate between themselves will make a major improvement when coordinating evacuations and moving groups of children.

TEMO will be issuing schools with four handheld radios and a power bank. Each set of radios is programmed for the school so teachers can seamlessly coordinate an emergency evacuation.

The radios are being bought through TEMO’s resilience funding that is part of the tsunami evacuation planning and resourcing.