Nick Mills: Does Windy Wellington need to toughen up?

EDITORIAL: Can I ask a simple question this morning? At what point does being prepared become being overprotective?  Now before anyone jumps on me and has a crack at me, let me make one thing crystal clear. Safety comes first.   If lives are genuinely at risk, authorities should act.   Nobody wants to see people injured or killed because someone was too slow to make a decision.  And I'm certainly not suggesting we ignore severe weather.   In fact, the latest figures show between March 2025 and the end of February this year, we had a damaging storm every eight days on average.   More than 33,000 insurance claims were lodged for flooding, wind and storm damage.  The risks are real.  But Wellington has now been through another state of emergency over predicted waves and high winds, and the reality is that what was forecast simply did not eventuate.   Mayor Andrew Little himself acknowledged that the predicted conditions "hadn't materialised.”  There had been no reports of major damage. The state of emergency has now been lifted.  So, my concern now is: are we becoming too quick to shut the city down?  I did some rough calculations this morning, because this whole thing concerns me greatly. Wellington's economy is worth around $56 billion a year.   Spread that across a normal working year and you're talking about roughly $200 million of economic activity every weekday.   Even if only 10 or 20 percent of that is disrupted because people stay home, businesses close, customers disappear and workers can't get into the city, that's potentially tens of millions of dollars affected.  Yesterday I walked into a well-known clothing store in the CBD and asked how it was going, didn’t even think about the state of emergency.  The answer? They hadn't had a single customer all morning.  Is that because of the weather? Maybe partly. The weather was fine in the city.  Is it because the city was under a state of emergency? I'd bet dollars to donuts that played a major role.   If you're told your city is in a state of emergency, you're probably not heading into town to buy a new jacket.  Then think about the ripple effects—  Parents scrambling with childcare, employees worried about getting home and small businesses, already battered by years of economic hardship, losing yet another trading day.  Preparation and resilience are good things. Panic is not.  And here's the other thing. We are Wellingtonians.   We are proud to be Wellingtonians.  We live in one of the windiest capitals in the world.   Windy Wellington.   We know what a southerly look like, and some of us actually love southerlies.  We know what big seas look like. We live on a coast.  Storms are part of living here.   Meanwhile, Wellington Airport remained open and aircraft continued landing. State of emergency and our major international airport was open.  Life carried on, in many respects. But in the back of everyone of everyone's minds: state of emergency. Panic, panic, panic.   Of course, authorities acted on the advice they had, and Mayor Little has defended the decision by pointing to the destructive 2020 storms and the uncertainty of forecasting.   I’m not saying what we did was wrong, I’m saying do we need to be more careful.  There will also be a review of the declaration, and that's exactly as it should be.  But perhaps we need a wider conversation.   LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.