Nelson–Tasman business continuity - the risk isn’t hypothetical, it’s recurring

• What is your single point(s) of failure?

• What is your business continuity?

• Can you risk waiting, afford the full noise systems or do you need a deployable Rare Continuity options?

Nelson / Tasman District isn’t short of hazards — and modern organisations aren’t short of digital dependency. The Nelson Tasman CDEM Group Plan 2025–2030 flags the region’s high-risk hazards as flooding, earthquake, tsunami, human pandemic, wildfire, and landslides, and it’s blunt about one thing: flooding is the most commonly occurring major natural hazard, with cascading impacts like roading disruption, isolated communities, and constrained access to key services.

And that’s not theory. The August 2022 floods triggered a State of Emergency and hit Marlborough alongside the top of the South. Independent event reporting described it as a 1-in-120-year rainfall outcome in places — and responders noted heavy infrastructure and property impacts. Translation: “rare” is starting to look suspiciously frequent.

Now overlay one uncomfortable truth: your organisation’s “ability to operate” is increasingly just “ability to connect.” When power, fibre, roads, buildings, or core platforms go down, businesses don’t politely pause — they bleed: transactions stop, records become inaccessible, teams scatter, comms degrade, and decision-making turns into WhatsApp chaos.

Downtime isn’t just annoying; it’s existential. New Zealand’s business continuity guidance (vendor-independent) frames continuity planning as essential to survival — because you don’t get to choose your disruption. And downtime costs climb fast: for many businesses, “an hour down” can mean thousands to tens of thousands in direct and indirect losses. That UPS in the corner? What does that do...ooops...it's off and can only boil a kettle at best....

Example disruption events

• 16–18 Jul 2021: a major storm-driven outage event recorded as a “major event” by Network Tasman. Multi-day weather windows are where failure compounds: power → comms → payments → cold chain → staffing.

• FY ended 31 Mar 2023: Network Tasman records two severe storm events as material drivers of unplanned outages. The key point isn’t the exact date — it’s that severe weather is statistically baked into annual reliability outcomes.

• 12 Jan 2024: a 33kV cable fault (Marsden Valley) drove widespread supply loss affecting Richmond / Hope / Brightwater / Wakefield. This is the “single-asset faults can still punch you in the face” category — no storm required.

• 9 Feb 2024: a broken conductor on the 33kV line supplying Tākaka caused interruption to ~2,500 consumers.

• Late Dec 2025 / early Jan 2026: storm damage knocked out power to ~10,000 properties in the district (trees down on lines).

Internet / telecom disruption events (especially rural)

The best documented repeat-fail pattern is Golden Bay connectivity — a classic single-point-of-failure story:

• Aug 2022: a slip at Birds Hill took out the road connection and the fibre-optic cable into Golden Bay.

• Sep 2023: fibre accidentally severed by contractors.

• 3 Jul 2025: broken fibre cut internet + cellphone services; 111 calling was impacted.

Business takeaway: if your comms depend on one corridor/cable, you don’t have “internet,” you have “internet until a digger sneezes.”

When Tasman has a “real” event (not a 20-minute blip), businesses typically lose a stack of dependencies at once:

1. Electricity → refrigeration/cold chain, production lines, pumps, alarms, lights, heating/cooling, charging, tooling.

2. Internet + mobile → POS/EFTPOS, ordering, bookings, dispatch, payroll, cloud apps (M365, Xero, practice management), remote access, phones.

3. Water / wastewater → hygiene compliance, food safety, toilets, cleaning, some industrial processes.

4. Road access (flooding/slips) → staff can’t get in, customers can’t reach you, deliveries stop, emergency response slows. (This was explicitly part of the July 2025 storm conditions: flooding/slips preventing access.)

Scale - the business blast radius?

Tasman District Council reports 7,686 business units (Feb 2023). Tasman’s population is ~60,000, concentrated in key wards: Richmond (20,400), Motueka (13,550), Moutere-Waimea (16,300), Golden Bay (5,730), Lakes-Murchison (4,100). Exports are large — $1.0958b in 2023 — led by horticulture/fruit, wood products, and seafood processing, which are particularly sensitive to cold chain, timing, and logistics.

A transparent way to estimate exposure is to distribute business units roughly by population: ~0.128 business units per person (7,686 / 60,000). That yields approximate business-unit exposure by ward:

• Golden Bay ~734

• Motueka ~1,736

• Moutere–Waimea ~2,088

• Richmond ~2,613

• Lakes–Murchison ~525

Caveat - business units ≠ storefronts (includes home businesses/contractors). But when an outage footprint is “most of a town/valley/ward,” this gives us a better sense of the scale of impact.

On costs: at a macro level, New Zealand uses a Value of Lost Load (VoLL) concept with a code-specified $20,000/MWh figure — a proxy for how expensive unserved energy becomes once downstream consequences are considered. At the micro level it’s uglier: a café loses EFTPOS and refrigeration; accommodation loses bookings and payments; packhouses lose product quality and freight windows; professional services lose billable hours and deadlines — and the costs are non-linear (restart procedures, rework, spoilage, fixed disruption costs).

• Compound risk is the norm. Floods/storms don’t hit one thing — they hit roads, power, comms, and water quality in the same 24–72h window.

• Single points of failure are real and repeatable. Golden Bay is the case study.

• Infrastructure can fail without bad weather. Cable faults and conductor breaks still take towns down.

• Water is a silent business killer. Boil notices and treatment outages don’t trend on social media — they still shut operations fast.

The blunt systems conclusion

Tasman has:

• Thousands of businesses, concentrated in a few wards/towns,

• A power network with 43,577 connections,

• Repeated examples of 10,000–13,000 customer outage events,

• Town-scale comms failures that even impact 111 calling,

• Water supply failures that force operational shutdowns.

So the “scale of the problem” isn’t “some businesses should maybe buy and rely on an uncharged UPS that lasts five minutes to power a kettle.” It’s: a meaningful slice of the regional economy and organisations can be knocked offline at once, and the highest-value sectors (export production, manufacturing, retail/hospitality, professional services) are structurally exposed

How prepared are you?

Want the honest answer on your own readiness?

Take our Rare Business Continuity & DR self-assessment survey. Supported, if helpful, by free engagement and assessment downstream - It’s designed to expose some real weak points (power runtime, comms paths, restore ability, RTO/RPO clarity, admin access, minimum viable operations) and give you a maturity score you can actually act on.

Rare Business Continuity Survey

Rare Business Continuity that Comes to you or somewhere safe

If you don’t want to keep rolling the dice every time power, comms, water, or access goes sideways, this is exactly where Rare Innovation’s Mobile Continuity packages come in: a rapid-deploy, self-contained “operational node” you can call on to keep your minimum viable operations running when your normal environment can’t.

Think independent connectivity + power, a secure workspace for incident command, and a proven way to re-establish the handful of systems and workflows that actually matter (payments/comms/records/coordination) — without forcing your team to improvise from car boots and kitchen tables. It’s delivered as tiered readiness + response options (from “we just need a solid fallback” through to “we need assured capacity”), and it’s deliberately designed to plug into your existing people/process/tools rather than replace them.