Infrastructure planning emergency levels of service for the Wellington region, Aotearoa New Zealand – An operationalised framework

‘Planning Emergency Levels of Service’ (PELOS) are goals for the delivery of infrastructure services following a major hazard event, such as an earthquake or flood. This paper presents an operationalised PELOS framework for the Wellington region based on interviews with emergency and critical infrastructure managers and discusses important changes from the preliminary to the operationalised framework. A shared understanding of these PELOS will help Wellington region infrastructure providers, emergency management professionals and the potentially impacted communities plan for major events. PELOS for the energy, telecommunications, transport, and water sectors have been developed, and high-level interdependencies considered. The PELOS framework can be updated for other regions, by the critical infrastructure entities and emergency managers, using locally relevant hazard scenarios. In turn, this approach can inform the end-users (communities) of the goals of the critical infrastructure providers following a major hazard event.