Civil Defence weighs up danger of landslide at evacuated Waihi Village

Civil Defence is assessing specialist advice after a series of earthquakes put Waihi Village, on the southern shores of Lake Taupo, at risk of a major landslide.

Fifty residents voluntarily left their homes after several earthquakes and heavy rain at the weekend increased the risk of a landslide in the Hipaua thermal area above the village.

Civil Defence said yesterday that the township could never be considered 100per cent safe until the landslide happened.

An emergency has been declared until noon tomorrow, the village is closed and an exclusion zone of about 600m extends into Waihi Bay.

Residents who had been staying in motels were being moved to a marae and backpackers hostel.

Civil Defence in Taupo was to assess advice from GNS Science and Opus last night and today on the state of the land above the village. A GNS team was helicoptered to make a visual assessment and put in poles to measure land movement.

Civil Defence controller Shamus Howard said that information would be assessed alongside rainfall and earthquake predictions to judge when it might be safe for people to return to the village.

"The teams have been looking for signs of cracks and other land movements," he said. "We'll be looking at all the information they've gathered, and weigh this up along with expected rainfall and whether we can expect another swarm of earthquakes in the area."

He said Civil Defence hoped to have initial results of the assessment available this morning.

There had been no consideration of carrying out engineering work to mitigate the risk, he said. Any activity of this kind would create another hazard, as many millions of cubic metres of material would move in the slip.

Waihi Marae is the ancestral home of Ngati Tuwharetoa.

Sixty people, including paramount chief Te Heuheu Tikino II, were killed in the village in a landslide in 1846.