The warning

I've been watching the news - what can I say, I'm old - and saw a short interview with a swaggering guy, sipping his beer in some campground up north, saying he's not worried about the warning.

He reckons he'll spend Cyclone Vaianu with a hangover. Panic doesn't help, of course, but laxity like this helps even less.

You don't see this type of flippant news coverage so much these days. It's stupid, for a start. More than that, it's disrespectful.

At best, these cavalier people, almost always blokes, waste the time of emergency services. They have to be watched over - and maybe hauled out of whatever predicaments they and their immaturity get themselves into.

Emergency services' time has an opportunity cost. In an extreme weather event, there is never enough urgent response to go around - so cavalier guys and their ego-driven own goals displace other people from an unmanageable queue. Elderly folks, disabled folks, folks without the money to buy safety just have to wait a little longer.

And emergency services are made up of, guess what, actual people. Every year their jobs get harder (although their pay and conditions don't seem to keep pace). Urgent call-outs and back-to-back shifts that were once uncommon have become the norm. Danger is greater. Disruption to family life is not the exception but the rule. Exhausted partners pick up the slack, taking sole charge of kids who might not see their mum or dad for days at a time. Trauma quietly compounds.

When this stress on emergency services was rare, we saw it as a sacrifice - but perversely, now that it's every other week, we hardly even notice.

Maybe saddest, the cavalier people mock the suffering of others. Over summer - it already seems so long ago - six people died in a landslide. They ranged from teenagers to grandparents. One died because she was going from campsite to campsite, frantically shouting, trying to warn people, trying to keep them safe.

She judged her own escape too late.

I think about this woman, the enormity of what she did, the lives she saved. I wonder how we honour and whakamana her memory - but I already know the answer.

It's simple. We listen to the warning.