Hopes a vast fire at Tongariro won’t turn the tourists away

Minister for Emergency Management and Recovery Mark Mitchell with rural firefighters as they prepare for the third day fighting the fire in Tongariro National Park. Photo / Mike Scott

By Alexia Russell of RNZ

Rain carries the hopes of a region, as it comes to the aid of fire fighters on the ground at Tongariro National Park.

Locals are worried that the destruction of part of this unique area will add to the string of setbacks that’s hit tourism in the region.

The burning tussock and regenerating native bush has seen the Tongariro Crossing, the major attraction for visitors in the area, close for at least a week.

But it’s not just the economy that could be dealt a blow.

“I’m grieving today. I’m feeling quite impacted by it to be honest,” says ecologist Nick Singers.

He’s the technical adviser for Project Tongariro, a volunteer group that works closely with the Department of Conservation in the area where the fire has ripped through.

Singers says the blaze has undone decades of work by conservationists, and put back its reforestation by more than a century.

“The Tongariro National Park is an area that’s regularly affected by disturbance – whether it’s volcanic disturbance – ash showers, lahars, lava flows, etcetera – and so it’s quite a dynamic landscape. It’s also been affected by humans, both Māori and European.

“The area that was burnt was successional vegetation, so it had regenerated from past fires. There was a very large fire in 1918 and then there was another one in 1947, and so that vegetation is around 78 to 105 years old. Or was.

“Historically it would have been forest, and that’s where it was heading. There was lots of woody vegetation. But - one of the key things about that area were that it was full of plants with very oily resinous wood material - things like turpentine scrub; phyllocladus, which is alpine celery pine; manuka; and there was also the exotic weed calluna.”

Most of the calluna had been killed by the heather beetle, and Singers believes that’s why the fire was so vigorous.

“A lot of that was sitting as dry tinder kindling that had been killed, so it was sort of this layer of thatch ready to go up,” he says.

“The vegetation was full of volatile oils so once it gets going, all of that stuff burns very, very hot.”

In the podcast, Singers explains the history of heather in the park and how the eradication of it became the world’s most successful weed bio-control operation, defoliating thousands of hectares.

Other victims of the fire will likely include freshwater fish, insects and birds.

While species such as the kārearea (falcon) would have been able to get themselves out of reach of the flames, Singers says the smaller creatures may well have been caught.

That includes endangered species such as the whio (blue duck) which lives near the Whakapapa River, pīwakawaka, riroriro (grey warbler) and mātātā (fernbird).

“Particularly fernbirds, they don’t actually fly particularly well, they sort of hop from bush to bush to bush.

“So some of those I suspect would have just been caught up. They wouldn’t have been able to escape. That area was a particular stronghold for the North Island fernbird, it was low and scrubby - that’s what they love. That’ll be a real major loss for that species.”

But he says the greatest threat is the return of weeds such as gorse, broom and heather. Their seeds will be hiding in the soil ready to break out again. Wilding pines had been eliminated from the area too, but after the fire it will be extremely vulnerable to those being re-established.

This winter hasn’t been a great one for the Ruapehu District as the famous Chateau remains closed, and there’s been uncertainty over the fate of the ski fields that saw a drop in advance bookings. A couple of weeks ago floods closed State Highway 4 into the area. Now, State Highway 47 is closed as firefighters do their work.

Mayor Weston Kirton says initially we were talking about 100ha which we thought “was a lot, but now we’re talking about 2800. That’s huge, and it’s left a big scar in our DoC estate, which of course is valuable to our communities,” he says.

Firefighters are likely to be in the area for at least a week and there will be hotspots for a long time.

“We only need a couple of hot days and things start evolving from that,” he says.

Kirton points out that while this will have some effect on tourism in the northern part of the district, it’s business as usual for most of the rest.

“But what I’m saying here is we might need a helping hand to actually make a recovery, because this has come at a point where we’d normally be buzzing with people going across the Tongariro Crossing.”

His district has been hit by eruptions, floods, mill closures, the Covid downturn, thin ski seasons, ski operators going bust and the historic chateau closing.

“It seems to be a mayor that attracts all these disasters,” he jokes.

But Civil Defence Minister Mark Mitchell and Conservation Minister Tama Potaka have been to visit and he’s optimistic there will be some sort of ‘bounce-back’ funding from the Government, whether it’s for replanting or to help encourage tourists to come back.

“They’ve been fully briefed on the situation, they understand the dynamics of this, they understand this is DoC estate that needs to be preserved, and they apparently are going to give us some financial support.”