Questions are being asked about why campers weren’t evacuated from Mount Maunganui’s popular campground at the foot of the mountain before a deadly slip, despite a series of smaller slips that were reported to authorities. Six people were buried and inquiries have been launched. Michael Morrah and Alanah Eriksen, who have been on the ground in the past week, detail who knew what and when.
It was Tauranga’s wettest day on record, with 274mm of rain falling in 24 hours.
Like other regions in the North Island, the area was under a red heavy rain warning – reserved for only the most extreme weather events. Two tropical storms had converged and hit the top of New Zealand last Wednesday.
People in the region had received an emergency mobile alert at 11.47am from Bay of Plenty’s Civil Defence, advising them to put their safety first and prepare to evacuate if needed.
After the overnight deluge, early-morning attention was initially on Pāpāmoa.
At 4.15am, emergency services got a call about a massive landslide that had taken out three homes on Welcome Bay Rd.
Police rushed to evacuate residents.
They would soon discover a 10-year-old boy and his grandmother were missing from one of the properties.
Over on Mount Maunganui’s Mauao, about 15km away, early-morning walkers were taking advantage of the clear skies after the rain.
The popular tracks are frequented by locals and tourists alike – a million visitors a year are recorded either walking the base track or scaling the 232m extinct volcano.
On one side of the mountain sits a surf beach and club. On the other, Pilot Bay is a harbour beach and a major cruise ship destination.
Nestled in between, at the base of the mountain, the Beachside Holiday Park has operated for 90 years, while the Mount Hot Pools has been around for 70. Both are owned by the Tauranga City Council.
Leading up to a long weekend and nearing the end of the summer school holidays, hundreds of people were staying at the campground on Thursday morning. Some families have been coming back to the beauty spot for more than 50 years.
Among the campers was Morrinsville school tutor Lisa Maclennan, 50, and her partner.
Warnings begin
Maclennan woke about 5am to find their campervan had been hit by a small slip above them overnight and the land was still deteriorating.
Wasting no time, she alerted Lance Macfarlane and his teenager daughter, who were staying in a blue tent next to them.
“She told me if she didn’t wake me up and warn us and then something happened, that it would forever be in the back of her mind,” Macfarlane told the Herald.
Maclennan, a literacy tutor at Morrinsville Intermediate, also managed to get other campers to move away from the base.
“She was warning everyone that there were slips and she recommended that they move,” Macfarlane said.
“I think she’s a hero.
“She saved lots of people and she didn’t have to do it. Obviously, it wasn’t her job to be waking people up and alerting them to potential danger.”
Maclennan spent the next couple of hours desperately trying to alert campground staff, Macfarlane claims.
He said she found no one was at the camp office but tried an after-hours number. It went through to security, “and no one came”.
Meanwhile, Mount local Alister McHardy had been fishing in the area when he spotted slips near the surf club.
At 5.47am, according to his call log seen by the Herald, he phoned 111, worried about campers below and walkers on the mountain.
The operator put him through to Fire and Emergency.
“I said there had been multiple slips, likely to be more and that it needs to be closed off.“
The call connected to Fire and Emergency at 5.48am.
McHardy claims, “they said I had to talk to the council”. The dispatcher said they would notify the council also, McHardy said. The conversation lasted three minutes and 27 seconds.
“I didn’t want to waste time. I had a gut feeling it was going to get much worse but the dispatcher said it was more a council matter and that they would notify council.”
Fire and Emergency called the council at 5.51am, according to Deputy National Commander Megan Stiffler.
“The landslip that was referenced in the 111 call received at 5.48am did not impact life or property and therefore Fire and Emergency did not dispatch firefighters to respond, instead we notified Tauranga City Council as the landowner responsible.”
But council chief executive Marty Grenfell claimed yesterday afternoon the message was not passed on.
“We’re aware that someone’s made that comment, we have no record of it ... but again, that’ll be information that will be sort[ed] through and commented on by the independent person.”
The council then later corrected his claim, saying further inquiries had revealed the council’s main contact centre received a call from Fire and Emergency around 5.50am.
Another camper woken by Maclennan told RNZ she called police at 6.18am.
“I explained to them about the slips. I said, ‘look, I understand that you guys will be really busy, and this might not be anything, but this is what’s happened here’.
“It was enough to push the ladies’ campervan forward ...
“And so I said, maybe you should send someone to have a look at that, just in case. You know, there’s a lot of kids here … and they said, yeah, it is a really busy night. It’s been a busy night. It’s a busy morning, we’ll try and get a unit there.”
Meanwhile, McHardy also started waking up campers, including Dutch and German tourists.
“I was like, ‘Sorry to wake you up, but you really should move’.”
Closing the Mount
Another local, Theo Spanbroek, intended to scale the Mount that morning.
He arrived on the Pilot Bay side about 7.30am to find a council vehicle pulling up to put up closure signs.
“They said, ‘We are closing the track because some of the road isn’t there anymore’. They were fairly casual. It didn’t feel like there was a huge danger of further slips.
“Admittedly, there had been a lot of rain.
“I thought maybe the slips were on the backside of the Mount.”
Heading the opposite direction for a beach walk instead, he spotted slips by the surf club.
“Even then people were just casually observing. There was no sense of urgency.”
At 7.35am, people were still on the mountain.
McHardy photographed a large slip showing two people walking above a section of freshly scarred earth that had crumbled away.
He said it was alarming to see how close the pair were to its edge and feared more slips would follow.
Colin McGonagle was walking around the mountain’s base at the same time when he noticed ruptures in the earth above the campsite.
“There was a little mini waterfall through there, lots of other streams, lots of other water coming through the embankment,” he told the Herald.
A photo he took at 7.42am captures two people in a campground golf buggy near waterlogged tents.
Macfarlane told the Herald one of the men in the buggy was the campground manager and the other was a council staffer.
“We told him there were slips and eventually he came through with the council guy in his golf buggy. They’ve seen it [the slips] and carried on to the other end [of the campground]. After that, we just waited. He was supposed to come back to us, but he never did.”
Macfarlane said staff seemed more concerned about the large slip behind the surf club than the one threatening the campground.
Around 7.45am, the camper who spoke to RNZ said she spotted a ute that was sign-written with Tauranga City Council.
She called out to tell the driver about the slips but is unsure if he heard her.
“I figured, well, everything will be fine. Someone from the council’s come, they’ve seen the slips, he’s driven past them, he’s driven through the water that was coming down from that corner that collapsed. So I had no worries after that.”
At 8.02am, council said on Facebook it had closed Mauao for the day.
“Fencing is getting put up, and we are hoping to get contractors in soon to start cleaning up,” the statement read.
But at no stage were campers beneath Mauao formally warned to evacuate.
Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell said yesterday, when asked if he knew whether campers were told to evacuate and, if so, at what time, there was “lots of information swirling around” and an inquiry would be had.
Macfarlane said by 8.30am, campground staff had arrived at the office.
At 8.45am, lifeguards posted pictures on Facebook of the slips, warning there had been “some significant slips overnight as a result of severe weather. The base track has been washed out in several locations and is not accessible. Stay safe”.
The council added in an emailed statement to media at 8.56am that the mountain was closed to the public as severe weather had “significantly destabilised the maunga, creating an ongoing risk of further slips and falling debris”.
The hot pools opened a few minutes later. People started filtering in for swims and massages.
Meanwhile, hero tutor Maclennan had gone into the ablution block – possibly to warn others of the threat.
Her tent neighbour, Macfarlane, and his daughter checked out after packing up.
The decision to leave at that time may have saved their lives.
Disaster strikes
At exactly 9.31am, the earth above where their tent had been collapsed in a catastrophic landslide that flattened the toilet and shower block, buried tents and destroyed caravans – sending one into the hot pools.
Macfarlane’s daughter was tying up her hair as they were about to set off for a walk on the beach.
“I just grabbed her and said, ‘run’. And we just ran, and we just kept going, keeping out of the way. You could hear all the noises and screaming. It was just terrible.”
He said his immediate priority was the safety of his daughter and ensuring she was kept away from the unfolding tragedy.
“I didn’t want her to see it anymore. No one expected that much dirt to come down.”
They eventually stopped running and sat on a bench near the beach and called his daughter’s mum.
They would later discover his ute, parked inside the campsite, had been damaged in the landslide. It had to be towed away by a towing company and is “a write-off”.
About 20 to 25 customers and seven employees were at the hot pools when the landslide hit.
Australian tourist Sonny Worrall, 17, was in one of the pools at the time and had to dive into another pool as a caravan tumbled over, coming close to him.
Canadian tourist Dion Siluch was having a massage at the complex when “the whole room began to violently shake”.
But the masseuse continued for about 10 minutes as the pair had “no idea what was going on”, until someone banged on the door.
“I looked outside the window and there was a caravan in the Mount pool,” Siluch said.
People were seen fleeing the pools covered in a layer of dirt.
Back at the campground and unaware of the deadly slip that had just happened 100m away, Auckland woman Karyn Henger, who had rented a cabin with her son Mikey Te Paa, 16, was packing up. A night of heavy rain was too much and they’d decided to leave early.
The first inkling of the unfolding disaster came from a group of startled friends returning from a walk who had seen the damaged pools.
Henger said she had not seen any campground or council staff warning people. Twelve workers – including holiday park and city operations staff – were on site at the time.
“I do feel angry about it, because there are people that are not going to come out alive, and we could have been among them as well.
“Where were the campground staff? Where were the council? Where was anybody to warn us that we needed to get out of there?
“When you’ve got families camping at the base of a mountain, you need to take responsibility for their safety.”
She finally spoke to campground staff as they were fleeing.
“They still didn’t seem to know really much of what was going on. They were as much in the dark as we were.”
After hearing about hero teacher Maclennan warning people, Henger says she thought: “Why was she even doing that? That was not her responsibility. She was a camper just like us.”
The missing
Roofer William Gardner, who lives on his 40ft yacht in Pilot Bay with his partner and child, was just about to take his jet ski out when he spotted the slip.
He ran to the scene barefoot, spending the first 20 minutes trying to figure out if people were trapped.
Terrified screams could be heard from beneath the rubble where the ablutions block was and it soon became clear people were trapped. Many of whom were likely using the bathroom facilities when the earth fell.
Gardner raced to get his tools from his van and with Whakatāne man Mark Tangney, who had been heading to the Mount for a hike, started taking the screws out of the roof to lift it off.
“I was one of the first there,” Tangney says.
“There were six or eight other guys there on the roof of the toilet block with tools just trying to take the roof off because we could hear people screaming ‘help us, help us, get us out of here’.”
Tangney said they “went hard” for about half an hour, but after 15 minutes, they could not hear the screams anymore.
They kept going but after about 30 minutes, the police told them to get off as it “was too dangerous”.
Tangney says it looked like the mud had dislodged about six caravans and the toilet block was completely twisted and turned around – probably about 20m from where it originally stood.
This is verified by video obtained by the Herald from visitor Bill Baker, who was walking past the campsite when the landslide hit.
His video shows the roof of the toilet block cut in half and upended on the ground next to a large pohutakawa which came down.
Dre Kumeroa, who is from Mount Maunganui but lives in Canberra, was in town for a holiday with his partner and children.
He was at a cafe across the road as the land started moving above the campground.
He rushed over to try and help pull people out, saying he was “ripping open tents”.
Five local lifeguards were at the surf club getting ready to start their shift when the slip happened. Ten other lifeguards from the UK and Europe had been staying at the club as they were to compete at the Eastern Regional Surf Lifesaving Championships, held every summer at Auckland Anniversary weekend.
“They ran down and started clearing the hot pool buildings and assisting with initial search efforts in the debris,” says Surf Lifesaving NZ eastern region manager Chaz Gibbons-Campbell.
Other lifeguards started opening the club as displaced campers flocked in, and it became an emergency hub.
“We were able to get all the campers in there and set up headquarters for the police and get people fed and watered,” Gibbons-Campbell said.
A camper told RNZ, “The group of people that was … camping in the area, were all in tears. There was an older couple that we were sitting with in there, and he was heartbroken. It was just terrible and so incredibly unfair.
“I don’t think there was many people that were in the surf club for the day that weren’t, you know, in tears. It was pretty difficult.”
Counting the cost
Additional lifeguards from the search and rescue squad connected to the club assisted police and Fire and Emergency, setting up tents.
A register was set up for campers to sign to confirm they had made it out alive.
But as authorities were still building up a picture of who was missing, some campers already knew their loved ones were buried in the rubble, having witnessed the horror.
Footage of a distraught man pacing towards the destroyed toilet block and crying has been seen by the Herald.
Maclennan was among the unaccounted for, as were 71-year-old Rotorua friends Jacqualine Wheeler and Susan Knowles, who camped at the site every summer.
Young couple Max Furse-Kee and Sharon Maccanico – both 15-year-old Pakūranga College students who had been on holiday with Maccanico’s family – were also missing, as was Swedish man Måns Bernhardsson, 20.
There was no check-out record of three other campers who did not turn up at the refuge centre, but eventually authorities caught up with them, confirming they survived.
Around midday, at the request of police, lifeguards escorted campers back to areas that were not affected by the slip to gather belongings and vacate the area.
As search teams and equipment were brought in from around the country and New Zealand’s media converged at the cordon, the grief-stricken families still at the surf club faced further disruption. Police made the call to evacuate the building at 4.30pm, due to risks of more slips on the mountain. No one has been allowed to return.
But compassionate locals have put distraught families up in their homes opposite the campground as they await news.
Death toll begins
Back in Pāpāmoa, an official death toll for the Tauranga landslides began when emergency services announced at 8.30pm they had discovered the bodies of a child and his grandmother.
Police wouldn’t recover some human remains from Mount Maunganui until the following night. It was announced Saturday the search had officially transitioned from a rescue operation to recovery.
They would not say - and still haven’t - who they think the remains belong to, with Chief Coroner Judge Anna Tutton saying: “In circumstances like this, identification can be a painstaking, complex process, especially when people are severely injured – and that process takes time.”
A steady stream of politicians, including Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, and iwi, emergency services and contractors continue to flow in and out of the cordon.
Locals come to leave flowers and pay their respects.
The search has been held up several times by threats of more slips and unstable land.
Police said last night it could take weeks.
“Due to the conditions, there is no timeline for completing our work.
“It is a delicate operation, and it will take as long as it takes.”
The council has commissioned an independent review, and WorkSafe says it will be looking into the organisations that had a duty of care for campers.
And as emergency personnel and the city’s mayor, Mahe Drysdale, front press conferences, vigils and a drop-in centre for people to pay their respects, they are all being asked the same question: why weren’t campers told to evacuate?