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on Whakaari?
Island volcano gave fair
warning of its impulsive and
devastating power…
but it went unheeded.
bays of Whakaari/White Island,
photographed on 9 December last
year, immediately following the tragic
volcanic eruption, which blanketed
every surface in a thick layer of ash.
This eruption took place on Whakaari/White Island, New Zealand, on 27 April 2016, more than three years before the catastrophe in December last year that claimed the lives of 21 people (17 of them Australians) and injured 26 others.
Geologists from GNS Science, NZ’s leading provider of geoscientific research, reconstructed the pulses of the eruption from acoustic and seismic data, and, three weeks later when they could safely land on the island again, began figuring out the reach of those pulses. The resulting scientific paper was published on 1 April last year, and its authors warned: “These eruptions clearly pose a significant hazard to the tourists that visit the island.” More than a quarter of the walking track had been bombarded by rock fragments. The pyroclastic surge, though just 5mm thick at its extremities, had nonetheless covered 95 per cent of the track.
YOU MIGHT WONDER if this eruption triggered any changes, but it happened at night, with no witnesses, so it simply passed on by. You might, therefore, be tempted to wish it into the daylight, when tourists would have been afoot, because then it might have garnered more notice – since it came in pulses of ascending violence, there would have been time to run, and the headlines would have been nothing more than “Tour operators reassess risk after near miss”. It would have been a wake-up call that produced only meetings over cups of tea, with scribbled notes, bottom-line business interests weighed against risk, and some kind of agreed reform.
Three years later, at 2.11pm on 9 December 2019, there was another eruption – one that came without warning. Except, perhaps, that on 8 December the instruments that measure tremors in nanometres momentarily spiked 30 per cent higher than any tremor during the previous two months. Or perhaps for a moment during a video shot by tourist Allessandro Kauffmann earlier in the afternoon. Kauffmann was part of the group aboard Phoenix, a White Island Tours vessel, and he videoed much of the island tour. At about 1.30pm, he panned along the hot, strangely bright stream flowing from the crater lake. Amid the snap and spit of boiling mineral water, the microphone caught an off-camera aside by a White Island Tours guide: “I’m a little bit worried why it’s going green.”
Then, during Whakaari’s long eruptive phase from 1976 to 1982, the keen young geologists of the NZ Geological Survey’s Rotorua office put together the first comprehensive analysis
gases, steam, rocks and ash at 2.11pm,
the volcano continued to cast huge
clouds of hot steam into the atmosphere
throughout the day.
“We took risks and didn’t even think about it,” says Ian Nairn, who was one of that group. “We often went out straight after a serious eruption. It was our job, our interest, and the main problem was how long it took to organise a boat or a helicopter.”
Peter and Jenny Tait first became similarly transfixed by the volcano’s dangerous charm when they took a group from Germany on a fishing charter, but, at the Germans’ impulsive request, finished up exploring the island. The Taits built a business out of taking tourists to stand at the junction of the real world and the unruly energy of the underworld: the strange colours, the steaming lake, the crater cliffs painted bright yellow at their base and then rising almost vertically to 300m, cupping the humans below within a thrilling amphitheatre.
“That first trip was in 1990,” Tait tells me, “and, as it developed, Jenny and I were taking six people a day there. It was very personal. The reaction of the punters was, ‘It’s unbelievable,’ and that’s what drove us to keep developing it.”
In 2017 the Taits sold their business, White Island Tours – a 27-year-old enterprise that came with a motel and cafe – to Ngati Awa Group Holdings, which kept on many of the Taits’ employees.
Michael Schade photographed the
eruptive column surging into the sky
from tour boat Phoenix. The last photo
he had taken while still on the island was
date-stamped 1.49pm – 22 minutes
before the deadly eruption.
On the afternoon of 9 December, Tait was sitting in his lounge, high on the rocky ridge that overlooks Whakatane and out across 50km of blue ocean to Whakaari. He saw the eruptive column’s silent rise. He didn’t know if there were people on the island or not.
THOSE ABOARD PHOENIX KNEW. At about 2pm, passengers had returned to the vessel, which was moored in Te Awapuia Bay on the south-eastern corner of the island. Phoenix motored north around Troup Head, giving its passengers one last photo opportunity directly up the crater, before it turned south to return to Whakatane.
It was right at that moment, to gasps of pure wonder, that the eruptive column boiled into the sky. Then the column darkened at the base, and a sinister ground-hugging wave steadily verwhelmed the island, billowing towards the vessel. The framing on every camera went up, down or sideways, jerking with fear.
The skipper accelerated clear of the ash cloud, and for his passengers the eruption was no more than a terrible fright. But there were people on board who knew that White Island Tours’ new flagship vessel, Te Puia Whakaari, was still moored back at Te Awapuia Bay, and that its tourists were still on shore. That meant 38 passengers from the cruise liner Ovation of the Seas, plus four guides. Meanwhile, the Rotorua-based company Volcanic Air had brought four tourists to the island on a Squirrel helicopter that the company’s pilot and guide had set down on a landing pad behind the ruin of the sulphur factory. That made 47 people still on the island.
At 2.14pm, Phoenix sent out an emergency call to Coastguard Whakatane, advising of an eruption and requesting urgent medical evacuation. Phoenix then sped back to Te Awapuia Bay, and called the coastguard again at 2.16pm, confirming casualties. Minutes later, Te Puia Whakaari also contacted the coastguard. The three calls triggered a Civil Defence emergency, alerting police, St John Ambulance services, rescue-helicopter services and hospitals on the mainland.
But Whakaari lay across 50km of rough ocean, far from any immediate help. As national agencies began to tool up, the locals were already organising their own ship-to-shore and air-to-ground rescues.
(in blue striped shirts) were rescuing
survivors from the landing aboard
Phoenix’s inflatables, a scene also
photographed by tourist Michael Schade.
As the sea-to-shore rescue got underway, an air-to-ground rescue was assembling. The rising plume from Whakaari had served as a shrill alarm for pilots from Whakatane, Rotorua and Taupo. Mark Law, head pilot of Whakatane-based helicopter operators Kahu NZ, saw the eruption as he drove back from Tauranga in his car. He got on the phone, and the Kahu base confirmed that GNS Science’s monitoring cameras on the island had blanked out. Simultaneously, high above the blue expanse of the Bay of Plenty, a helicopter pilot who had lifted off from Whakaari just six minutes earlier called his head pilot, Tim Barrow, at Volcanic Air, and described the scale of the eruption. Barrow then called Law.
So a small airborne unit was formed, bound together not by official roles or rehearsals, but by the natural meshing of grave concerns and aided by local knowledge of landing pads within the crater.
BY THEN, THE SEA-TO-SHORE rescue was closing up, and Phoenix had become a de facto hospital ship. Kingi’s inflatable had delivered the people on the landing to the vessel, including the four Volcanic Air tourists and their pilot. Three of those five were probably the luckiest people on the island that day, because when the volcano blew they were already at the shoreline, the last point of interest in theirhour-long tour. The pilot urged them into the water, and he and the two who immersed themselves escaped serious injury. The other two hesitated, and were later hospitalised for burns.
Kingi, back on the island, had gone inland on the walking track towards the crater to find more survivors and help them down to the inflatable. The last person Kingi found, just as he had decided to stop searching, was 19-year-old Australian Jesse Langford, who stumbled down towards him. Jesse had been more than 300m inland when the volcano blew. He was his family’s only survivor, because his father, Anthony, mother, Kristine, and sister, Winona, passed away around him.
Those who had sustained the worst burns had been placed at the front of the vessel, and two doctors had stepped forward from among the passengers to tend to them – a general practitioner on holiday from the UK, and another from Germany.
Geoff Hopkins, a pastor at Arise church in Hamilton with a St John certificate, also provided assistance. He dug deep into remote first-aid training he’d done in the UK, but he was dealing with people drifting in and out of consciousness, people who were saying, “I’m not going to make it.” So he dug deeper yet, into his faith, and told them, “You’re not going to give up.”
His daughter, Lillani, was at the back of the vessel with the other victims, doing her best to stave off hypothermia and shock. She found herself singing the evangelical song “Waymaker”:
You are here – moving in our midst…
You are here – working in this place…
You are here – healing every heart…
And if she stopped there’d be a touch on her leg, and a whisper: “Keep singing.”
Halfway back, Phoenix was met by a coastguard vessel delivering paramedics and pain-relief medication.
About 3pm, the Kahu helicopters entered the crater airspace, and Law descended to 200 feet for a closer look. The centre of ▶
hydrothermal eruption
of retrieving the dead from the island
was a perilous one in the unpredictable
conditions following the eruption. The
search scene also included the waters
around the island where two victims had
been swept out to sea by heavy rains.
Breathing was difficult, even with gas masks. They assessed the dead, the dying and the living. Through a handheld radio – they had to remove their gas masks to speak into it – they described injuries to Funnell, their top cover, who relayed the information to Whakatane Hospital.
The fliers felt the desperation in everyone they encountered, and their response was to talk back, to comfort, to tell each person, “We’re here. We’ll get you out,” before moving on to the next person. Law got word that the big air ambulances were still being staged at Whakatane, so any immediate rescue was up to them. The most badly injured – by ballistics as well as scalding – were those nearest the crater. The Kahu team hopped one of the choppers further up into the threatening miasma to get them, loaded five people, and Hill took off for Whakatane Hospital. Below him, out of the steamy cauldron that had produced the lethal blast, the volcano suddenly started ashing.
By now, it was about 3.40pm, and Barrow was settling his helicopter onto a landing pad by the shore. He’d flown in from Rotorua with pilot Graeme Hopcroft. Funnell had updated them on conditions, and they raced up to the crater to join the search. They half-carried one survivor to their chopper, then joined the Kahu crew to assist five more survivors into Law’s machine. Law lifted up and out for Whakatane. Barrow, Hopcroft and Storey loaded one more survivor into the Volcanic Air helicopter, then Barrow and Hopcroft fired it up and banked south for Whakatane.
For a time, Storey was left alone. He spent the next half-hour grouping bodies for later retrieval. Among the bodies was his friend, White Island Tours guide Hayden Marshall-Inman. A second Volcanic Air helicopter arrived to pick up Storey, and completed an aerial reconnaissance of the crater.
By then it was all but over. Two Westpac air-ambulance helicopters arrived, one circling on standby above the crater, while the second landed St John medical director Tony Smith and three other clinicians on the eerie domain below. They checked the bodies for signs of life, and confirmed no survivors were left behind.
IN GEOLOGICAL TERMS, the steam-driven eruption on 9 December was a small one, similar in energy and range to the 27 April event three years earlier. One significant difference was that it happened more quickly.
Shane Cronin, professor of volcanology at the University of Auckland, compares the 9 December eruption to a giant ▶
for Whakaari volcano was raised to
level 2 a er increases in sulphur gases
and seismic activity were detected by
GNS Science and its GeoNet geological
hazard monitoring system.
While this group of mostly Australians was exploring the island, the volcano suddenly erupted, shooting scalding steam, ash and debris along the track between the crater and the landing area, catching many as they made their way back towards tour boat Te Puia Whakaari. Within minutes staff aboard a boat that had recently left the island, Phoenix, launched a rescue mission, plucking 23 tourists from the water and landing area, many with terrible injuries. Others trapped further inland were later rescued by chopper pilots who instantly scrambled in response to the huge steam plume visible from the coast 50km away. Eight people died on the island, while a further 13 succumbed afterwards from their injuries.
Among the 21 dead were 17 Australian nationals, with a further 10 seriously injured, many of whom remain in hospital or rehabilitation eight months later. The youngest victim was 13yearold Knox Grammar School (Sydney) student Matthew Hollander, who died along with his 16yearold brother, Berend, and both parents Barbara and Martin. The family moved to Sydney from the USA five years earlier.
The tragedy is now the subject of official investigations in NZ. Royal Caribbean, operators of Ovation of the Seas, may face legal action in Australia and the USA, over claims the company allegedly failed to adequately warn of the risks of visiting the island. Island tours have been suspended indefinitely.
Then an eruptive column of steam and ash climbed into the sky, perilous to any who stood close by.
But the most lethal event in the eruptive sequence was the third: a dense, ground-hugging pyroclastic surge, which flowed from the vent, over the walking track and right down to the eastern shoreline.
Cronin calculates from past studies of steam-driven eruptions on Whakaari that this surge would have burst from the crater at 300ºC and 100km/hour, losing force and heat in the ambient air as it rolled east. It was still boiling hot but had slowed to about 25km/hour when it flowed into the sea.
The surge was mainly formed of steam and ash, but carried within it a “salty aerosol”, says Cronin. Past testing of residues from this type of eruption has found them to consist mostly of fine fragments of pulverised rock coated in sulphur and acid salts, which turn into concentrated droplets of sulphuric acid when they come into contact with air, water or human skin. The remaining residues are hydrochloric acid and small amounts of hydroflouoric acid, which is the most corrosive of the residues, especially if inhaled.
Although the Squirrel helicopter was 1km away from the eruptive vent, its rotor blades flapped up and down like a bird’s wings in the turbulence of the pressure wave. Then the pyroclastic surge plastered it with ash. Afterwards, it sat stranded in the grey surrounds, grievously damaged, its carbon fibre and aluminium rotors broken and drooping, undone by nature’s power.
THE ERUPTION HAD triggered a national emergency, and leadership had been formally handed to Bay of Plenty’s Civil Defence Emergency Management Group, with police the lead agency for search and rescue, and for recovery. The helicopter pilots had operated independently of the official system, but fell under its command once they landed and were stood down.
Eight bodies still lay on the island, two of them White Island Tours guides – Tipene Maangi and Hayden Marshall- Inman. As public pressure rose by the day to recover the Whakaari dead, Marshall-Inman became a symbol for all eight. The 40-year-old was well liked within the communities of Whakatane and Ohope, and he’d been with White Island Tours for many years.
Beauty on the brink
IT’S JUST AFTER lunchtime, the morning rains have finally cleared and the sun begins breaking through the clouds. Max Breckenridge, a captive release project officer with BirdLife Australia (BLA) is slowly walking along a dirt road that cuts through a patch of untouched spotted gum–ironbark forest in the Lower Hunter Valley in New South Wales.
Our new conservation superpower
There were expectations it would reveal much about the evolution of this continent’s largely unique mammal fauna, and it has. But to most scientists working in Australian wildlife conservation, it didn’t seem to have a lot of practical relevance.
Lifeblood of the nation
Below the modern Brewarrina Weir in north-western New South Wales, a 2km bend holds the remains of this ancient structure, a complex of dry-stone walls and a site of engineering brilliance. Displaying advanced knowledge of river hydrology and fish ecology, the traps were designed to catch Murray cod, golden and silver perch and other fish, but allow breeding stock to pass through.
When a city rises
THAT FEBRUARY 2011 earthquake, which struck during the city’s lunch hour, was the most destructive in a series. It was the one that broke so many of the Central Business District’s verticals and horizontals – its buildings and the roads, sewers, water and gas pipes. It was shallow and ferocious. Its peak vertical ground acceleration of 2.2G (more than twice the acceleration of gravity) momentarily lifted parts of Christchurch to the sort of face-distorting speeds astronauts experience when they ascend into space.
Grantham’s road to recovery
IT WAS 10 JANUARY 2011 and once again it was pouring with rain. Queensland had already endured its wettest spring and December on record, and yet still the rain kept coming. I was working at the time as a freelance photographer for Queensland’s main newspaper, The Courier Mail. And weary of capturing “wet weather photos”, I’d decided to stay dry inside my Toowoomba office.