NZ volcano disaster: excursion touted as trip ‘of a lifetime’

A tour company promoted visits as an ‘experience of a lifetime’. But one expert says White Island was ‘unimaginably dangerous’.

New Zealand’s deadly volcano eruption was “a disaster waiting to happen”, with an expert saying the tourists who walked into the crater were trapped.

Ray Cas, a volcanology expert at Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, had visited White Island twice and told The Australian it had been “a disaster waiting to happen for many years”.

“White Island … experiences significant explosive eruptions every three to five years,” Emeritus Professor Cas said. “It’s constantly in a state of unrest and to allow tourists to walk right to the edge of a very active volcano time and time again is ­unimaginably dangerous.”

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While Emeritus Professor Ray Cas said there was nothing wrong with the warnings given about White Island, he was sharply critical of the access for tourists. He also spoke of the dangers for anyone in the crater when the volcano erupted. “The people were actually inside the crater, right adjacent to the vents of the volcano — that’s the issue,” he said. “They are in this very confined space and when the event occurs there is actually nowhere to go.

“There would have been huge blocks of rock flying at ballistic speeds, a lot of ash and gas released making visibility zero, so people would not have known where to go.”

The professor said hot rock debris and crater waters would have severely burned the people caught in the eruption. “The scientists got it right and it was just really unfortunate timing,” Professor Cas said. “You have a confluence of many volcanic acids within this very confined space making it very difficult to go anywhere if an event does occur.”

Monash University Geosciences Professor Ray Cas.

‘Trip of a lifetime’

White Island Tours promoted trips to New Zealand’s most active volcano as an “adventure” and ­“experience of a lifetime”, offering customers the chance to see the inner crater.

But the company has ­removed content from its website since Monday’s disaster, including a warning that “passengers should be aware that there is always a risk of eruptive activity regardless of the alert level”. Instead, the web page says “we are currently experiencing an emergency”, and directs people looking for loved ones to the Red Cross.

New Zealand police are investigating why tour operators allowed holidaymakers to explore the ­crater of the highly volatile volcano just weeks after the seismic alert level was raised, as ­authorities said up to 14 people were believed to have died in the eruption.

White Island Tours chairman Paul Quinn told Radio New Zealand that the raised alert level over the past few weeks did not meet its threshold for cancelling tours.

 

“GNS (GNS Science) do the monitoring, and they advise us if there are any changes, and we operate around their guidelines in terms of what levels are stipulated,” Mr Quinn said. “Level 3 and above we liaise more directly with GNS, but that level 2 is still within our operat­ional guidelines.”

White Island Tours took about 17,500 visitors to the island last year, with trips running routinely at an alert level 2, a classification from geological service GeoNet that denotes moderate to heightened volcanic unrest.

The White Island Tours website said the business “follows a comprehensive safety plan which determines our activities on the ­island at the various levels”.

Tourists are provided with hard hats and gas masks to protect against the sulfurous steam and it is compulsory to wear fully ­enclosed shoes.

“Trust us when we say: you can’t beat the experience of stepping foot on to the inner crater of an active volcano!” the company’s Facebook page said in November. Mr Quinn described Monday’s disaster as a “big tragedy”.

“Devastation is an understatement. This is a terrible tragedy and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone who has been impacted,” he said on the company’s Facebook page.

“We take our responsibilities very seriously. We take our health and safety responsibilities very ­seriously and this is a big tragedy for us,” he told TVNZ.

The volcano is a tourism drawcard, with more than 20,000 visitors annually. The New Zealand Bay of Plenty website promotes various tours offering the chance to “step foot on a live volcano”.

“On a clear day you can still see billowing clouds of steam rising out of White Island’s vent from all along the eastern Bay of Plenty’s coastline,” the website said. “But you need to get up close to truly ­experience this force of nature.

“Gas masks and hard hats are provided as this active volcano is still very much alive. Its seismic ­activity is closely monitored, ­although the island is usually on an alert level rating of 1 or 2 on a scale from 0 to 5.”

The alert level was raised to level 2 on November 18 but GNS volcanic geologist Graham Leonard said there had been level 2 alerts since it was added to the classification scale in 2014 that had not resulted in eruptions.

“The volcano has been in a ­period of unrest, with eruptions on and off since 2011,” he said.

“This is a very active volcano … the destabilisation can just happen suddenly.”

Several of the dead and missing were from Royal Caribbean cruise ship Ovation of the Seas. The company did not respond to specific questions about monitoring of the alert level, instead issuing a blanket statement. “The news from White Island is devastating. The details that are emerging are heartbreaking,” it said.

Twenty-four Australians onboard the cruise ship are understood to have taken the option of a trip to White Island and its active volcano. At $300 per person, the seven-hour tour was one of the priciest options offered to the 4000 or so Ovation passengers, but one also marketed by Royal Caribbean as an “unforgettable” adventure. It boasted of taking visitors so close to the volcanic action they might need to don breathing masks and hardhats.

White Island from the air.

History of White Island

Whakaari/White Island has been privately owned and managed for more than 80 years. The secluded island in the Bay of Plenty has been held by the Buttles since 1936 when it was purchased by family patriarch and Auckland stockbroker George Raymond Buttle.

Buttle rejected an approach by the New Zealand government to buy Whakaari/White Island in 1953 and struck a deal to instead turn it into a private scenic reserve, a status that remains.

The island remains in the possession of the Buttle family and the title was transferred in 2012 to Whakaari Trustee, which lists Peter, James and Andrew Buttle as shareholders.

Access to the island, which was last valued at $75,000 in 1998, is restricted to several professional tourist operators, who each pay a royalty to the trust in exchange for the right to take travellers on sightseeing expeditions around the active volcano, with 20,000 visitors making the trip last year alone.

Whakaari/White Island owner Peter Buttle on the island in 2016. Picture: Facebook

A 60 to 80-minute boat cruise to White Island with an hour’s “fully guided tour of the inner crater” cost $NZ200 ($192) for adults, said an archived version of the website. Two-hour helicopter trips to land on and explore the island cost between $NZ673 and $NZ1057 a person.

Andrew Buttle has said he and brother Peter once camped on the island, helping with research on muttonbirds, according to the New Zealand Herald. The men’s mother, Beverley Buttle, 91, told the Herald: “We really have been very hard hit by this. There’s nothing the family can do.”