It was the worst natural disaster any Pacific country has seen so far in this century. It surpassed the 2004 Indonesia tsunami in numbers of dead and displaced; the 2011 Fukushima earthquake in terms of physical destruction; and the 2039 Siberian wildfires in the scope of disruption to the affected nation’s environment. The 2053 floods in New Zealand devastated many of that country’s major cities and would also eventually play a sizable role in the toppling of its government. Even today, nearly fifteen years after it happened, the scars of that catastrophe can still be seen on some parts of New Zealand’s coastline and in the faces of the survivors.

At the time of the floods Henry Woodburn had been New Zealand’s prime minister for nearly seven years. For a country whose collective morale had been shaken by the Sino-Korean crisis of 2042 and the Tokyo Nikkei stock market crash a year later the popular Woodburn had seemed like a godsend; his never-say-die demeanor in the face of hardship and knack for turning phrases at the drop of a hat looked at first glance to be what was needed to lift New Zealand from its doldrums. But when the post-flooding recovery efforts began Woodburn’s handling-- or from the point of view of his critics, mishandling --of the situation would throw into relief serious flaws in his governing style and engender a massive political crisis which would climax with Woodburn being voted out of office in one of the worst electoral defeats any New Zealander political candidate has suffered in the past hundred years.

The event which precipitated the floods was an undersea quake measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale late on the afternoon of July 17th, 2053; the epicenter of the quake was located just twenty miles off the New Zealand coastline, giving the country’s tsunami warning systems little time to react to the temblor-- or its coastal communities to evacuate their citizens from the danger zone before the first waves of the flood hit. It was 3:31 PM local time when the undersea quake hit; within an hour after the first tremor struck almost half New Zealand’s coastline would be underwater....

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...and half an hour after that citizens of New Zealand’s huge neighbor and ally Australia would be seeing grim satellite images of dead bodies floating in the sea and ships being leveled by the tidal waves generated by the quake. Then-Australian prime minister Miranda Hawkins was in Canberra meeting with her cabinet when word reached the Lodge of the disaster in New Zealand; within minutes she was in a live video chat with New Zealand’s ambassador to Australia listening to his first reports on the quake and tsunami.

The ambassador’s report was, to say the least, heartrending. From Poor Knights Island to Cook Strait, hundreds of cities, towns, and villages in New Zealand’s northern coast regions had suffered a blow one Japanese online news commentator aptly dubbed “assault by the sea on the earth”. The country’s capital, Wellington, was a no- man’s-land of ruined buildings and flooded streets. Even cities not directly in the disaster zone were suffering badly-- ripple effects from the initial tremors of the seaquake had knocked out three vital thermal energy plants near the southern edge of Cook Strait, robbing Christchurch of at least half its electrical power. And within a few days dock workers at the southern coastal port of Dunedin would send word of massive fields of debris drifting down from the north coast and posing a serious threat to navigation as well as the ecosystem of Dunedin’s harbor.

New Zealander maritime authorities had already confirmed 60 ships sunk or capsized by the tsunami, with more than a hundred others missing at sea. To the alarm of American diplomats in Wellington, one of those missing vessels was the cruise ship SS Pacific Horizon, which just minutes before the seaquake hit had departed Wellington Harbor on the first leg of a return voyage to its home port in Los Angeles after completing a three-week tour of Papua New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand. The aircraft carrier USS John McCain was immediately deployed from Pearl Harbor to assist in searching for the missing cruise ship. A week later, the worst fears of American officials and the families of those who’d been on board Pacific Horizon at the time the seaquake struck would be confirmed when the McCain’s sonar operators detected wreckage from the ill-fated cruise vessel fifteen nautical miles from the mouth of Wellington Harbor.

At dusk on July 17th the true extent of the human toll the disaster had taken on New Zealand began to become apparent. Rescue squads combing through the rubble of cities and towns affected by the quake and tsunami were finding few if any survivors within the ruins, and camera drones flying over the New Zealand coastline saw what looked like a human blanket of corpses floating in the waters offshore. An Australian naval cruiser dispatched from Perth to ferry medical assistance to the New Zealanders reported sighting the burning wreckage of a Finnish tanker about forty nautical miles from the mouth of Wellington Harbor; subsequent investigation of the wreck determined that the tanker had apparently sustained a hull rupture near its main fuel tanks after colliding with another vessel while it was trying to turn away from the leading edge of the tsunami.

It was at this point when Prime Minister Woodburn made his first critical mistake in his response to the disaster which had hit his country. The person he chose to take charge of the post-disaster recovery effort, Emma Keeler, was selected more due to her personal loyalty to Woodburn than to her competence in managing the aftermath of natural catastrophes. American news commentators were quick to draw comparisons between Keeler and Mike Brown, the FEMA director whose support of President George W. Bush prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had become a source of controversy in the wake of the hurricane and eventually cost Brown his job. Keeler’s only experience with running a large organization prior to the 2053 floods was a stint in charge of Woodburn’s media affairs team during his first campaign for the prime minister’s office; it hardly took much time for Keeler to demonstrate she was in over her head in her effort to co-ordinate recovery efforts in the wake of the disaster.

Some critics of the Woodburn government, in fact, would later cynically observe that Keeler’s approach to the post-flooding recovery effort was almost as much of a disaster for New Zealand as the floods themselves. To cite just one example of her mismanagement of the most critical aspects of the recover, she badly overestimated the number of hospital beds available in the country in the wake of the floods; this miscalculation was to lead to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the first weeks after the tsunami. It would also contribute to what TV news commentator aptly called “a medical Chernobyl” as the nation’s health care system gradually became overwhelmed by the multiple and ever-growing demands placed on it by the aftermath of the tsunami and seaquake.

Indeed, if it hadn’t been for assistance from both private and government health organizations in Australia, the United States, and Japan it’s distinctly possible New Zealand’s medical system might well have collapsed in the face of Keeler’s miscalculations about the state of her country’s hospitals. It’s also conceivable the already gigantic death toll from the floods and the seaquake might have risen that much higher. As it was, New Zealand’s medical system would hang by a thread for weeks after the flooding. One Wellington doctor was so driven to frustration by Keeler’s miscues on this score that he finally quit his job and burned his medical school diploma in a burst of rage. This may sound like an extreme reaction on the doctor’s part to what was going on around him, but one can hardly blame him for his outburst given how nearly aspect of life in New Zealand had been thrown into chaos by the floods and the Woodburn government’s response to them.

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While it might be an exaggeration to say the Woodburn government was instantly doomed to collapse because of Emma Keeler, she certainly didn’t do much to help his position in the aftermath of the floods. In addition to lacking even the most basic experience in running disaster relief operations, Keeler suffered an unfortunate tendency to behave condescendingly toward certain members of the foreign media during her press conferences-- a fact one Canadian news blogger was quick to find out shortly after arriving in New Zealand for a first-hand look at how the survivors of the flooding were trying to cope with the disaster. A press conference had been organized at one of the relief camps outside Christchurch and the blogger, known to his readers as “Newsjunkie45”, would be sitting in the second row next to a well-respected Korean TV news correspondent who had won several prestigious awards for her work in covering major international events. When she asked Keeler how the

New Zealander government planned to deal with the increasing cases of looting that were plaguing the country’s larger northern cities at the time, Keeler proceeded to commit one of the biggest faux pas that any government official anywhere has ever made. Not only did Keeler refer to the Korean reporter by the wrong name twice, but spoke to her in a highly patronizing tone that would have offended even the most placid of people.

The TV newswoman’s colleagues were justifiably upset at the way Keeler had behaved toward her, and so for that matter were more than a few of Keeler’s fellow New Zealanders. And Keeler certainly didn’t help her case much when she told a BBC news anchor the next day that she didn’t get what the fuss was about. Those comments added further fuel to an already raging PR firestorm and sparked a flood of social media posts demanding her immediate resignation; around the same time opposition leaders in New Zealand’s parliament started meeting behind closed doors to brainstorm what if anything could be done to convince Woodburn to replace her as head of the post-flood relief effort.

Even some members of Woodburn’s own cabinet were (at least in private)expressing doubts about Keeler’s abilities. Case in point: then-New Zealand defense minister Eugenia Segal, who had tried up to and even beyond the last minute to dissuade the prime minister from naming Keeler as head of the disaster relief effort. When despite her warnings about Keeler’s shortcomings Woodburn hired Keeler anyway the defense minister threatened to resign in protest and had to be talked out of it by her cabinet peers. And yet, as bad as things had already been so far, they were about to get even worse...