How a Volcanic Eruption Led to a Criminal Trial

In 2019, a volcano erupted off the coast of New Zealand - killing 22 tourists who were on it at the time. Four years later, a criminal trial began - where prosecutors claimed that several individuals and companies had violated workplace safety laws, and had “used an active volcano to make money.” Phoebe interviews Emily Clark from the Australian Broadcasting Company about the trial and what happened next. You can also watch this interview at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Say hello on ⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our ⁠⁠⁠occasional newsletter⁠⁠⁠. Follow the show and review us on ⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Sign up for Criminal Plus⁠⁠⁠ to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make ⁠⁠⁠This is Love⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠Phoebe Reads a Mystery⁠⁠⁠. Check out ⁠⁠⁠our online shop⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 1:10Speaker 03

  They've climbed this kind of old ladder that leads up to the jetty. They're standing on the island. They've been given gas marks and they're told that it's one level below a full-scale eruption.

• 1:30Speaker 04

  In 2019, a volcano erupted off the coast of New Zealand. 22 people who were visiting the volcano died. Emily Clark covered what happened next. She's a journalist on the foreign desk for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Emily, thanks for being here.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  Tell me a little bit about Whakari, which is also known as White Island. It's off the northern coast of New Zealand. Just talk about this volcano a little bit.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really unique in that when we say volcano, I don't want you to picture this kind of peak with lava coming down the side. It's not that kind of volcano. Its crater is a bowl. And when it erupts, it doesn't have lava that spills out of the top. It is gas, toxic gas, debris, rocks, with immense pressure that has built inside. And actually, that crater is the peak and the rest of the volcano is underneath the ocean. So if you think about the part of the volcano that tourists and guides were able to access that day,

• 2:42Speaker 03

  it was the very, very top of it. So it's a little bit different in terms of the classic vision you might have of a volcano and an eruption, but very, very dangerous.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  This volcano, this island which has this volcano on it, it's somewhat unique because it's a privately owned island. How did that happen?

• 3:09Speaker 03

  The States back two generations. The Buttle family, their grandfather, thought it might be nice to own an island. He was a broker in Auckland and it became available and he bought it. And it was passed down through the generations and it's still privately held by the three Buttle brothers. But the brothers have held it and didn't necessarily make a lot of money off it for a long time. There were attempts to mine it, but ultimately that was kind of unsuccessful and too dangerous. And there was attempts at other kinds of tourism. But it's absolute wilderness. It's so difficult to do anything there.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  It's difficult to even get big boats very close to its coastline. So if you think about the infrastructure that's required to really do something at scale, even though it's this novel place, it's just really difficult and really expensive. But they had come to an arrangement with some tour companies to run these small group tours into the crater. And those were offered on cruise ships that would pull up nearby. It was a really kind of interesting arrangement where it's not, there was almost like a lease fee paid, but then also almost like a commission paid for every tourist that was on the island. The private owners would get a fee.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  So it's a little bit of a strange structure, not a typical kind of landlord-tenant situation. But they sort of did have this regular tour operation on the island that the owners were making money from.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Before 2019, how dangerous was this volcano thought to me? I mean, there were tour groups, there were cruise ships pulling up to the island.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Very dangerous. I mean, this was a volcano that was actively monitored by New Zealand's Volcano Monitor. And they had raised the level to a level two, which is one step before a full-scale eruption, just weeks before. It sold as one of New Zealand's most dangerous and most active volcanoes. That's in the brochure that tourists kind of can look through before taking the tour. So that's, I just sort of say like the culture in New Zealand around what you can do there, the tourism there. You can jump off cliffs, you can go on volcanoes, you can speed around a sound in a jet boat.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  That's part of the sell. And it's so, yes, it's a dangerous and active volcano that was monitored from a scientific and a regulatory perspective, but also sold from a tourism perspective.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  And did those tourists who were going to visit, had planned their trips, were they made aware that the level, that the threat had been raised, you know, level two, level three, that it was now more dangerous?

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was kind of the big question going into the trial. And I guess what was most profound and moving to me was hearing from survivors and hearing from families of people who didn't survive. But what came up time and again was the refrain, "I was in New Zealand, I thought I would be safe." And almost everybody said it once they were on the stand. But we heard a lot of detail around when they were made aware of the level of activity that this volcano was at. And it was when they were standing on it. So not necessarily in the crater, but they're off the cruise ship.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  They've taken the bus to Whakatane. So that's the journey. They've taken the smaller boat to the area around the island. They've taken another smaller boat to get up to its coast. They've climbed this kind of old ladder that leads up to the jetty. They're standing on the island. They've been given gas marks and they're told that it's one level below a full-scale eruption.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Let's talk about December 9, 2019. How many people were on the island that day? Just tell me who was on the island and who were they?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  There were 47 people on the island. That's a mix of tour guides, helicopter pilots and tourists, mostly tourists, but lots of Australians. There are also tourists from the United States, which we heard from in the trial, Germany. There were some New Zealanders as well, people from China and other countries. So a real mix. But I guess the people that we heard from in the trial, that's where I got the most sense of who they were. There are a lot of people that were nervous about, you know, hadn't done something like this before.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  And one woman from America said, you know, "I really had to be talked into it. I was so nervous. I'm a worrier," I remember her saying. And I saw myself in her. I just thought, "I don't like volatile things." And I could tell that she didn't either. And so, you know, I wouldn't characterize, I think it's hard to characterize the whole group, but I wouldn't say that they were daredevils or anything like that. It was just kind of normal people on holiday. They'd been on a cruise. They were looking to relax and decided to go on an excursion.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  And then tell me what happened.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  At about just past 2 o'clock in the afternoon, while two tour groups were on the island, one that's kind of referred to as the deep crater group, they're right down in the center of the crater and one that was more on the rim. The volcano moved to a full-scale eruption, so hit that level three. And we've heard from people that did survive and we've seen video that they were literally taking at the time, capturing the moment. We've seen photos that were taken in the seconds after and they're running for their lives. And some people managed to survive. I mean, they were horrifically burnt and will be in rehabilitation for the rest of their lives,

• 9:43Speaker 03

  but by hiding behind kind of a series of rocks. It lasted for two minutes, is what we heard. And from there, it's this agonizing, really harrowing journey trying to get back to that jetty that was absolutely not made for an emergency evacuation in any way. And we heard from a young man who survived but lost all of his family, where he knew he was conscious and he knew he could walk. And he was looking at his parents and he had to make a choice about, "If I stop for them, I know I won't be able to get back up again,"

• 10:28Speaker 03

  is what he told the court. And he decided to keep walking. And just listening to him make, you know, talk through making that decision, it was just awful. And you just know that his life is like altered forever. But he made it back to the jetty. And then there was kind of this retelling of, you know, if you think about someone's been severely burnt, has steam and gas burns, and they're trying to make their way down a ladder that's probably been in place for nearly 100 years or something. It's just one kind of challenge after another.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  And then we heard from a young woman who also was evacuated. But

• 11:18Speaker 03

  She managed to make it to the jetty. She managed to get on a boat. Um, she knew she had to get back to land. And she was laying on the deck of this boat. Um, aware of chaos around her, but at the bottom of the wall of the boat was a hole and she could see land. And she thinks that that view and that sort of kept her alive because she was just able to see it getting just ever so closer over the course of an hour or so. Um, and that's just getting back to the mainland. But it's a very small town. Whakatane is a small town. Even, I really got the sense that even surviving that initial blast,

• 12:02Speaker 03

  some of the most difficult decisions, the trauma, the sense of really being just in such a difficult, um, situation where your life is on the line. But you're, all of a sudden, you're, that wilderness that you kind of wanted to see is now absolutely working against you.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  We'll be right back.

• 12:34Speaker 05

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• 13:06Speaker 04

  The following year, there were criminal charges brought against 13 different parties related to the eruption. And, and the charges were brought by something called WorkSafe New Zealand. Can you explain what WorkSafe New Zealand is?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. WorkSafe New Zealand is basically a regulator. So a government agency set up to make sure that businesses, other agencies are complying with the obligations under the WorkSafe Health and Safety laws in New Zealand. And WorkSafe New Zealand itself was born out of a massive disaster in New Zealand called the Pike River Mine Disaster, where men were trapped underground. Some of them haven't been found. And there were found to be likely, you know, problems with the safety of that mine. And so it kind of led to this commission and this reckoning

• 14:09Speaker 03

  around what needed to happen to make workplaces safer in New Zealand.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  So if we wanted to talk about those 13 defendants and what the kind of allegations were, the, the crux of the case was that three individuals who own the island, their company, and other, so nine other parties had breached their obligations under the workplace health and safety laws. And that led to a catastrophic event, fatal, mass fatalities. The onus was on WorkSafe New Zealand to prove their argument that this was a workplace, that not only the people who were obviously at work, like tour guides, but also the people in their care,

• 14:57Speaker 03

  tourists, were protected under WorkSafe legislation. And then that there had been breaches of that by all of the parties.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  There, there's something unique to New Zealand. It, it's this, it's this state-run no-fault insurance scheme. Called the Accident Compensation Corporation. I, I had never heard of something like this before. What is this Accident Compensation Corporation?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is basically a no-fault system. So a no-fault personal injury cover that exists in New Zealand. So you can't sue a company in New Zealand if you're injured. There's, and there's a no-fault kind of rule. And that's because of the existence of the A double C. So, um, what that means is there's not kind of a health insurance, private health system there in the way that there is in other parts of the world, including the US. Everyone who was injured on that island was taken care of in New Zealand public health system for free.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  So there's this, there's this kind of two systems that work together where you can't sue because there's this no-fault legal framework under which all businesses in New Zealand operate. But if you are injured, you'll be looked after.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  And so that's where a lot of people who were injured, well, everyone who was injured on Whakari sort of fell. They were looked after while they were in New Zealand. But when they went home, there is no way to make a civil claim.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  So it's these two systems that work together. There is quite a unique model, but there are some scholars who believe it almost means that you can operate and not really have to really think about the risk and not really have to have an insurance company assess it at any point to say, maybe we're not going to cover you for taking people into the crater of an island, of, of an island that is actually a volcano. Like that, that part of the process doesn't happen in New Zealand.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  There was a criminal trial held in 2023. What was that trial like?

• 17:26Speaker 03

  It was fascinating. It was, you know, six hours a day for 10 weeks. Um, a live stream made available. We heard at the start from survivors, um, family members of people who didn't survive, um, colleagues of people who didn't survive. So really harrowing testimony at the start where you really got a sense of how desperate and hopeless that day was and that rescue effort was. And then it moved into really technical aspects, like legal technicalities, learning a lot about volcanoes and how difficult they are to monitor.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  And right down to the clothing that people were wearing and that they should have been, you know, men fared a lot better than women on the island because women were in active wear. And that's kind of the worst thing that you can be wearing. But if you're in like loose cotton, the burns were less severe. So like, we were getting into so much detail about fabrics and warnings and, you know, that the safety equipment was just a gas mask and a hard hat, not anything else that you might wear when you go into a highly toxic, potentially combustible environment. So it was a wide-ranging trial. And not all of those 13 defendants made it to trial.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Some did plead guilty before the day. The three brothers, their company, and then two other kind of tour companies, um, made it to trial. Before the trial was over, the three individuals, the three brothers and the two tour companies had had their charges dismissed. And it was the company that the brothers owned that technically holds the island, um, Whakari Management Limited, that was found guilty at trial, but has since challenged that, appealed that and had the conviction overturned in the High Court. So it's really, everything that we went through at trial really didn't produce anything.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  It was only the parties that had pled guilty beforehand or, or had charges downgraded and then pled guilty beforehand that, that registered convictions.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  I mean, what, what were the sentences?

• 19:51Speaker 03

  They're fines, so.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Just fines?

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, fines and then orders to pay, um, pay damages, as you said.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  I, I think that there is something that the judge said during this sentencing of the tour companies and, um, that, he said that they used an active volcano to make money. That was kind of the overarching theme here is.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  You knew, you knew what could happen.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  It was literally in the brochure. And, and that was a big argument of the prosecution, WorkSafe's lawyers all the way through. And, and sort of part of their argument as to why the brothers were, according to them, liable as well. Because it wasn't, it wasn't just a traditional landlord-tenant arrangement. So the, the brothers, the owner, the volcano owner's defense lawyer would say, well, you know, am I as a landlord responsible for the operations and the workplace safety that my tenant, a, a commercial business is conducting or not conducting?

• 21:06Speaker 03

  And kind of logically think about that and you're like, well, no, that would be really unusual.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  But this is an active volcano, so it is an unusual situation. And it was established early on in the trial that the brothers and their holding company were receiving almost a commission for each tourist that visited the island, which is also not a typical landlord-tenant situation. So very messy. And even though the trial judge believed that Whakari Management Limited, that the brothers' company was obligated to meet those workplace health and safety standards and didn't, the, there was a different school of thought at the High Court and that they ruled that that, that's not a workplace and that the onus is not on them.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  So it was thrown out?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it was dismissed.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  I think those brothers should have to pay a little money.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  The trial judge agreed with you.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  I mean, that, that, that's a, I mean, you have, yeah. That, it's like a, a responsibility to humanity. We see a risk, let's shut it down. But that's just my opinion. I wasn't, I wasn't, I'm not making the decisions. But I would say those, you know, that's a problem, I would say.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got the sense that. It might have been different if this was a different legal approach, but because this was through the lens of it being a workplace, they were able to say, well, it's not our workplace and be successful in that argument.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  There is still a coroner's inquest going on in New Zealand related to the eruption. What does that mean in New Zealand?

• 23:00Speaker 03

  Basically, this is where there's been deaths that need to be investigated at a kind of court level. So a coroner can be appointed to say, okay, there haven't necessarily been charges, or there may have been, but we think that these deaths, or sometimes it's a single death, is something that just needs to be looked at again. And it's a commission of inquiry that's held in a court setting. And we have them in Australia as well. A lot of the time, it's pressure builds from families or survivors or something,

• 23:42Speaker 03

  and it's another level of inquiry. Witnesses can be called, testimony is heard. Sometimes it's open hearings, sometimes it's not. And it's kind of a forensic look and seem to be much more transparent than maybe a police investigation or something like that.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  Can any new charges be brought after this, you know, coronal inquiry, when new information, when more information is put out there, more testimonies? Is there that possibility?

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Yes, it's a possibility, absolutely. The inquiry itself doesn't do that, but it might make a recommendation. And it might be that it's something like Pike River, where they recommend a different regulatory environment, where that gets changed again, that actually this private volcano slipped through and we need to make a change. So the recommendations might not always be charges. It might be something structural to prevent it happening again.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Since the eruption, is Whakari open to tourists? Can you still go to the island?

• 24:56Speaker 03

  No, I don't believe you can. I think it was shut down immediately after, and it's been very active since then. We saw it get back to a level two multiple times. I think even last year it went to a level two. I'm not aware that it's been open, and I would be very surprised if that was to happen, particularly with an inquiry still ongoing.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  The appeal in the High Court, you know, only finished up last year. It's a very active place, and I think the worst thing has happened, and it's changed forever.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  Has this inquiry, the disaster, has it impacted the way that tourism operates in New Zealand? Have you seen, has anyone seen any more stringent safety protocols for other volcanoes, for river rafting? I mean, are people more wary now?

• 25:57Speaker 03

  I'm not too sure. I mean, I think in the, certainly in 2023, when this was in the news every day, yes, there was a sense that there was almost, I guess, some reputational work to be done. You know, this is tourism and extreme tourism and getting to do things that you can't do anywhere else is a big part of the cell of New Zealand. And that sort of needed to be restored. And, you know, Whakari erupted in the December before the pandemic began. So there's this real moment where there was kind of business as usual in New Zealand tourism, and then a massive disaster

• 26:41Speaker 03

  that people all around the world were affected by. And then the pandemic, and now it's kind of the after time. So definitely a period of recovery for the industry generally.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Well, thank you very much, Emily.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  That's Emily Clark from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. We're trying something new and sharing videos of these Tuesday conversations on YouTube. If you'd like to watch, you can find all of our videos at youtube.com/criminalpodcast or just click the link in our show notes. I'm Phoebe Judge. Thanks for listening.

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