NZ Engine

Source: Radio New Zealand

Fire and Emergency is pouring cold water on a claim from the firefighters’ union that four cities are without life-saving high-reach ladder trucks.

On Thursday, the Professional Firefighters’ Union (NZPFU) said the specialised trucks in four cities were broken and communities faced hours of waiting for back-up if needed.

However, Fire and Emergency NZ (FENZ) said the claims were untrue and that it could provide alternative vehicles whenever they were needed.

It comes as union members are set to strike again today, stopping work for an hour at midday over their collective employment agreement.

What the union says

NZPFU said the Rotorua aerial truck broke down at a fire at Taupō-nui-a-Tia College on Sunday, resulting in an almost two-hour delay for back-up from Hamilton.

It said New Plymouth, Palmerston North and Gisborne’s aerial trucks were also all broken.

The union pointed to a national aerial strategy, which was meant to come off the back of a 2019 fire at Auckland’s International Convention Centre.

“Seven years later, that strategy is still to be completed. Instead, the organisation has prioritised corporate restructuring, cost-cutting, and the elimination of frontline emergency services to communities,” it said.

FENZ responds

However, FENZ said it was “not true that four Type 4 aerial trucks are out of action”.

It said Rotorua’s appliance was now back in service, and Gisborne’s was available despite being in the workshop for a minor issue.

Palmerston North’s truck was having a scheduled service and would be available again on Friday, while New Plymouth’s aerial truck was also in the workshop getting an intermittent electrical issue diagnosed and repaired.

“For scheduled services and minor repairs, we generally make arrangements that if a truck [is] in the workshop overnight it will be left in an operational state so the station can use it if needed. Similarly, if they need it during the day the workshop will endeavour to stop what they are doing and make it available,” a spokesperson said.

“It’s important to understand that we have 16 operational aerial appliances the same type as the Rotorua aerial, that get a proactive service 4 times a year. These services typically take 1-3 days each, plus any time for repairs. This means on average there is a Type 4 in the workshop for a proactive service for about 2.5 days for every week of the year. This is good maintenance practice, and demonstrates our investment in looking after our fleet.”

FENZ had a fleet of about 1300 trucks, the spokesperson said, and the agency was investing more than $20 million per year over the next three years to upgrade its fleet, plus an additional $12.5m on new heavy aerial trucks.

“Our firefighters are trained to use a range of tactics for different types of incidents. This means that if one particular type of fire truck is unavailable, they can adapt their tactics to the resources that they have.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A spooky image described a “grim reaper” has shown up in a medical scan of someone who’d just be in a car accident.

The person was actually unharmed, but the New Zealand Medical Journal has highlighted the case an an example of pareidolia.

That was the tendency of humans to see faces or figures in objects.

The image in the journal was from a radiograph of the atlas bone of the neck.

It looked like a skull surrounded by a black hood although, on closer inspection, it could also be perceived as a friendly skeleton.

The report, by Stephen Rowlands, said the tendency to spot faces in objects was evolutionarily advantageous but the interpretations could sometimes be humorous or eerie.

“Cases of pareidolia in medicine are rare but not unprecedented, with reported examples including the Star Wars “Baby Yoda” character being seen in sacral magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scans,” it said.

The image was in fact created by a cluster of cysts in the neck.

Even though the patient was not seriously injured, the cysts could make them more susceptible to a neck injury.

The image was a good chance to reinforce anatomical knowledge but also to show the “cognitive pitfalls” that could come with radiology, the report said.

“Awareness of pareidolia is important for radiologists and clinicians alike, as it underscores the influence of subconscious visual biases on image.”

A University of Sydney study in 2021 concluded being good at spotting faces was part of human evolution – and that was why they tended to see them in objects.

Facial recognition happened in a few hundred milliseconds.

It was beneficial to be able to spot and assess a face quickly and the benefit of never missing a face outweighed sometimes getting it wrong, the study found.

Social media is full of examples of faces in gherkins or trees or power sockets and more.

More than 20 years ago a Florida woman made headlines when she sold a cheese sandwich for US$28,000 because it looked like an image of the Virgin Mary.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Imported liquified natural gas could be a stopgap insurance policy against dry years – or an expensive, dirty fuel that will hit Kiwis in the pocket

The Government’s proposed plan to import liquefied natural gas detonated a political fight this week – not over energy, but over whether Kiwis are about to be hit with a new “gas tax”.

“If it looks like a tax and it quacks like a tax, it’s a tax,” was the echo throughout parliament, and fiercely debated on talkback radio.

But behind the rhetoric sits a serious problem: New Zealand’s domestic gas supply is shrinking, electricity demand is rising, and officials warn the country risks shortages without backup fuel.

So imported LNG, most likely from Australia, is being pitched as that backup.

The plan would see New Zealand import super-cooled natural gas, shipped in from overseas, stored and regasified for use in electricity generation and industry.

Newsroom senior political reporter Marc Daalder tells The Detail it’s a proposed stopgap – insurance against dry years, dwindling gas reserves, and rising demand.

“Every once in a while, it rains less than you’d like it to, particularly in autumn and winter.

“That means our hydro lakes run low, and we can’t necessarily rely on things like wind, [as] it tends to be less windy when it’s less rainy; or solar in the winter when the sun isn’t shining, the sun’s gone down at the time we have our peak power demand, which is usually around 6 pm in July or August when people get home and turn on the heat and start cooking dinner, and suddenly the country’s power demand spikes.

“So renewables on their own aren’t able to fill that gap. We burn fossil fuels instead in dry years … but the problem is that we don’t have quite enough fossil fuel generation and quite enough supply, particularly of gas, to be able to reliably access it when you need it in a dry year.

“And that’s because of the second problem that’s going on, which is that our gas reserves are dwindling. They have essentially fallen off a cliff in the last few years.”

Not for want of trying, he says, with $1.5 billion spent on drilling 53 different exploration wells.

“A few of them have had small successes, but it’s turned out that the big, big fields that we have relied on for quite a long time have just started coming up empty.”

He says LNG is more expensive than domestic gas – about double the price.

“The theory is, on the government’s part, this is a backstop. The gas is available if we need it in a dry year, yes it’s more expensive, so it won’t be used otherwise.”

Daalder warns that, potentially, LNG could be dirtier than coal.

“There has been some research recently to suggest when you account for the emissions that go into producing the gas, into converting it to LNG, the leakages that occur while it’s being shipped across the ocean, and then it has to be regasified, and then distributed around a country like New Zealand, then actually LNG is potentially as dirty or dirtier than coal when you take that full supply chain into account.”

Questions remain

Martin Gummer, managing director of Optima, which looks at energy management solutions, tells The Detail that he largely supports the move, saying gas remains critical for manufacturing, food processing, and electricity reliability.

“You’ve got heavy industry, major manufacturers, steel, wood processors but also a wide spectrum of intermediate-sized businesses such as food products,” says Gummer. Schools and hospitals are also big gas users.

Gummer wrote an open letter to the prime minister that was published in the NZ Herald last December which was critical of the government’s handling of the energy problem and called for an urgent “bold, decisive” strategy.

As the country fast runs out of natural gas, Gummer says the LNG announcement won’t address all the concerns and there are still questions over the date of opening of a new plant and the price customers pay for the gas.

“While LNG is not a perfect answer, there is no perfect answer, it is probably the next best and most sensible interim step that needs to be taken.”

A missing part of the jigsaw is a funding stream – or subsidy – to assist industry to transition to renewable energy sources.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Finance Minister Nicola Willis is urging the previous Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr to front up to the inquiry into the economic responses to Covid-19.

The government announced the independent review on Wednesday, saying it would identify key lessons from the spike in inflation and house prices.

The central bank’s actions – including official cash rate cuts and money printing – as well as its interaction with government policy, will all be in scope.

Willis said it was up to Orr whether he appeared, but had a message for him.

“Put New Zealand’s interests at the heart of your decision,” she said.

“It’s in New Zealand’s interests that you are candid about the decisions the Reserve Bank made in response to the Covid pandemic so that our country can learn from any mistakes that you made.”

Willis said she would still be going ahead with the inquiry whether Orr was still governor or not.

“Yes. I first sought advice on the shape of a potential inquiry when we first came into government. The decision I made at that time was to first focus on the legislating of a singular inflation-fighting target; the renegotiation of a funding agreement,” she said.

“At the point of Adrian Orr’s resignation, which occurred of course just a few months into our term as government, I determined it wouldn’t be appropriate while we were recruiting for a new governor to initiate the review, but the appointment of Dr Anna Breman has provided an appropriate juncture.”

Opposition parties have criticised the timing of the review – with the findings set to be released in September, just weeks before the 7 November election – labelling it a politically motivated hit-job and an attack on the central bank’s independence.

Willis said the reviewers – former Cyprus central banker Athanasios Orphanides and former RBNZ assistant governor David Archer – would be travelling to New Zealand to carry out their work including conducting interviews.

They would have access to all Reserve Bank information, she said, and she expected it would also look at wealth inequality.

Orr led the bank during the pandemic but resigned unexpectedly last March over a lack of funding for the central bank.

His resignation came more than a year after the government took office.

Messy handling of his exit later led chair Neil Quigley to resign too, putting Willis under pressure over what she knew and when.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand