Cantabrians affected by severe flooding have panned an evacuation map released by their local council as "absolutely useless" and "awful".
An evacuation notice was issued late on Sunday night for areas close to north Canterbury's Eyre River since the stopbanks expected to fail. Fernside residents near parts of the Ashley River were also told they should leave immediately because their stopbanks were at risk of failing.
When these announcements were made just before 9pm on Sunday, the Waimakariri District Council (WDC) released two maps showing the outlines of evacuation areas. However, the maps didn't have street or road names, making it difficult for some locals to decipher whether they needed to evacuate.
"Well, I thought I understood the area between Wolffs Road and North Eyre Road [the areas that needed to evacuate], but I can't make any sense of the bits of map on this page," a disgruntled person wrote on WDC's Facebook post detailing the evacuations.
"A map actually needs road names, place names, some clue as to where it is?!! This is unhelpful, putting it politely."
One Twitter user posted a video showing two of her family members attempting to decode the WDC's image by comparing it to an actual map.
"I don't want to tell you how to do your job [WDC] but this map is absolutely useless. None of the streets in the evacuation zone are labelled," she tweeted.
"One more complaint about this awful map, the wee squares are property boundaries, not roads although they're the same thickness and colour as the road lines."
WDC released an interactive map later on Sunday evening where people can input their address and see whether they need to evacuate.
A Civil Defence spokesperson says it was always their plan to release an interactive map, but they wanted to alert people to evacuations as soon as possible.
"The PDF information and maps provided were the best available at the time and we followed up shortly after these were released with a more detailed web map," they told Newshub in a statement.
"The more detailed web map is what we have been using for our updates (when we have an update to make) since."
Civil Defence encourages Cantabrians to keep an eye on their website for updates, advice, and news, including whether they need to evacuate.
MetService forecasts the Christchurch region will continue to have heavy rain until 7pm on Monday before showers fall throughout the night.
