Kia orana to everyone in the Cook Islands this week. Thinking of you.
Over the weekend, Tropical Cyclone Wati came through the southern Cooks. Category 2.
Winds near 100 km/h, gusting to 140 km/h around Aitutaki. On Saturday, flights in and out of Rarotonga were cancelled and people were left waiting at the airport while resorts scrambled to find them beds.
The good news first. Aitutaki’s mayor said the island came through “relatively unscathed.” Power crews are already restoring lines. And after a long dry spell, some people were glad of the rain.
But I keep coming back to that photo of people waiting in the terminal.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the Pacific this year, and have a lot of close friends in the Cook Islands through work and sport...and it got us thinking...
On an island, the airport isn’t just transport. It’s the hospital transfer, the medicine supply, the tourist economy, the family flying home for a funeral, and the first relief flight after a disaster. When it stops, almost everything stops with it.
In a big city, we plan around redundancy. If one road closes, you take another. If one airport is fogged in, you divert. On a small island there’s often one runway, one terminal, one power supply and one way out.
So resilience in the Pacific looks different. It’s less about building bigger, and more about asking:
What has to keep working when the wind hits 140?
How fast can it reopen once the wind drops?
Who’s stranded in the meantime, and where do they go?
And Wati arrived in October, before the season normally starts. If the storms come earlier and the seasons stretch, “once in a while” planning starts to look out of date.
The Cook Islands have always been resourceful. Every weekend like this one is also a lesson for the rest of us.
Kia manuia, Cook Islands. Arohanui.
Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory.
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