Kestrel Director Dave Brunsdon is now a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Announced in the 2022 New Year’s Honours, the accolade has been awarded for Dave’s services to both engineering and emergency management. He says his has been a ‘fortunate career’. “Fortunate because of the...
Kestrel shares the lessons learnt from working with customers through previous health epidemics and other regional events. Since Covid-19 emerged as a global pandemic crisis Kestrel has been helping clients with their plans to handle the potential impact on their organisation. From being a...
Annual crisis exercises build confidence and always throw up new areas for improvement. Sue Jeffries, Risk and Insurance Manager for Contact Energy, says they’ve been holding annual exercises with Kestrel since 2012 and even then, she would like to hold them more often! “We have three crisis...
Kestrel Director Dave Brunsdon has just returned from Sicily where he was one of the two lead trainers for an international urban search and rescue (USAR) Structural Engineering Course. The course was held in the town of Poggioreale in the middle of Sicily and organised by the German Federal...
Governing through crisis Kestrel consultant John Hamilton presented at the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Crisis and Emergency Management Conference (CEMC) held in Abu Dhabi in March 2019. The invitation came on the back of John’s participation in an initiative developed by the New Zealand Embassy in...
The origins In 2003 Kestrel was established to assist the emergency management sector adapt to the many changes required by the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act that was introduced in 2002. As one of the founders, Dave Brunsdon had been closely involved in both Lifelines engineering and...
The crises that businesses and organisations faced over the past year were many and varied. Kestrel Director, Sandra Pedersen, says companies today are faced with so many different potential threats and issues that it’s impossible to plan for every single scenario. “Over the past 12 months we’ve...
Building a resilient organisation is more than just making sure the crisis management team knows what to do when things go wrong. Kestrel Director Karen Stephens says it’s also important to take a bigger picture view across an entire organisation. “When one of our clients wanted to understand how...
The linchpin of the crisis management team (CMT) is the CMT support team. In our experience, the CMTs that do well in a crisis have a practiced and prepared support team helping them to manage information. What the CMT support team does This team works very closely with the CMT and it’s their job...
Evacuating staff and running a realistic crisis exercise doesn’t need to interrupt business as usual. Kestrel’s Sandra Pedersen says it’s always a balancing act when designing crisis scenarios. “We need to make the crisis as real as possible and we need to ‘test’ as many people and procedures as...