NZ volcano disaster: Private peak of White Island ‘unimaginably’ deadly

New Zealand’s Whakaari/White Island has been privately owned and managed for more than 80 years.

Peter Buttle on the island in a photo uploaded in 2016. Picture: Facebook

It is visited by thousands of intrepid tourists each year but New Zealand’s Whakaari/White Island, where 14 people are believed to have lost their lives this week, 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.

White Island Tours, which owns a fleet of boats that operates daily tours to Whakaari/White Island, had ferried 47 people to the island before the volcano erupted at 2.11pm on Monday. The company’s website has been shut down, stating “We are currently experiencing an emergency” and listing contact information.

A White Island Tours press release issued on Monday said the company was deeply saddened following the eruption.

“Devastation is an understatement. This is a terrible tragedy and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone who has been impacted,” White Island Tours chairman Paul Quinn said.

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.”

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.”