The recovery operation at the Mount Maunganui landslide continues with police warning it could take days or even weeks.
Already, questions are being asked about who knew what, and when.
Tauranga City Council has launched an independent review into what happened in the run-up to the deadly landslide.
Tauranga Mayor Mahé Drysdale said the review’s scope is currently being worked through.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said there is a “strong case” for an additional independent government inquiry.
Minister Chris Penk has been appointed in an assistant minister role supporting Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell. The inquiry would answer questions, including whether there was a missed opportunity to evacuate people sooner.
University of Canterbury senior lecturer in disaster risk and resilience, Dr Tom Robinson, told The Front Page that landslides are an incredibly complex hazard.
“One that’s probably underrepresented or less thought about.
“There’s really good education going on around earthquakes. We’ve also got tsunamis, the ‘long or strong, get gone’ messaging.
“Landslides tend to be, typically, much more rapid. You don’t have much warning that they’re coming, and really, the best thing to do is try to get out of the way. And that’s unfortunately not often possible.
“So, I think that we do need a bit more education around that, but it’s probably more around looking for the signs of landslides, particularly when we’ve got slopes that are unstable,” he said.
Robinson said landslides are extremely complicated and essentially a fight between gravity and friction.
“Gravity is trying to pull material off the slope, and friction is trying to keep it all together. That’s constantly changing and evolving.
“The real challenge we have with landslides is knowing exactly where and, importantly, when they’re going to occur.
“We have a reasonably good understanding of the processes that cause landslides. We understand to a degree where they are more or less likely to occur.
“Take this particular slope in Mount Maunganui. We know there was a slide there in the 1970s. But as far as I’m aware, there doesn’t seem to have been any instability since, and that includes Cyclone Wilma in 2011 and Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary storms,” he said.
However, it is easier to identify zones where they’re more likely to happen, he said.
“Timing is always going to be the issue, but I think that’s the conversation we need to have right now, whether we should be living in these zones.
“Should we be having tourists and sites in these zones, or having roads or recreational activities there. The difficulty is, it’s not just landslides that we’ve got to think about. We have to think about flooding, coastal inundation, we’ve got earthquakes, and volcanoes.
“We’re a beautiful island nation because of all these hazards. That makes it difficult, though, to decide where is safe to live, and the reality is there’s never going to be somewhere that is perfectly safe to live or to camp. We need, what I would call, an all-hazards approach, where we really look at where all of the potential hazards are, how likely they are, and what the impacts of those hazards are likely to be, to try and decide where the safest location is.
“Trying to find what is the lowest risk and what is the lowest risk that we’re prepared to live with and we’re prepared to accept as a nation, that’s the challenge,” he said.
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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