Words: Cherie Howie
Editor: David Rowe
Design: Paul Slater
Motion graphic: Nathan Meek
It was a single word, unflinchingly direct and utterly terrifying.
“Run,” White Island Tours guide Hayden Marshall-Inman yelled to Stephanie Browitt and the more than a dozen other tourists with her when the volcano under their feet began erupting on an early summer’s afternoon.
Hayden Marshall-Inman and Stephanie Browitt
Hayden Marshall-Inman and Stephanie Browitt
Seven minutes earlier, at 2.04pm on December 9, 2019, 23-year-old Browitt had been standing at the lip of Whakaari/White Island’s sulphur-green crater lake, the ultimate destination for her and 37 other day-trippers from the Tauranga-docked Ovation of the Seas cruise ship.
The tourists, mostly Australian families, had been divided into two tour groups of 19, each led by two White Island Tours guides and each now on different parts of the island. Visiting the island at the same time were Volcanic Air helicopter pilot Brian Depauw and his four German passengers.
People can be seen inside the crater just before the eruption. Photo / Geonet
People can be seen inside the crater just before the eruption. Photo / Geonet
All had come to see a wonder of nature they thought was safe, but which has also been an active volcano for at least 150,000 years.
GeoNet keeps an eye on the privately owned island both remotely - with various cameras, sensors and seismometers - and on site, with frequent sample-collecting visits. Three weeks earlier, GeoNet had raised White Island’s volcanic alert level to 2.
The island had last been at that level five months earlier. According to the national hazard monitoring organisation, it meant there was “moderate to heightened volcanic unrest” and “potential for eruption hazards”.
As the group reached the crater, Browitt overheard a guide - also captured on younger sister Krystal Browitt’s mobile phone footage - saying level 3 was an eruption and they were “nearing level 3 now”.
The crater walk would be cut short, but there was still time to pose for a photo.
Krystal Browitt, Paul Browitt and Stephanie Browitt at the crater on Whakaari/White Island. Photo / Supplied
Krystal Browitt, Paul Browitt and Stephanie Browitt at the crater on Whakaari/White Island. Photo / Supplied
Canary yellow hard-hats on their heads and black gas masks on their faces, the Melbourne sisters stood arm-in-arm in the sunshine with their 55-year-old dad Paul, clouds of steam rising behind the trio’s backs in their last photo together.
Paul Browitt, his legs bare in shorts, is smiling broadly. On his right, 21-year-old Krystal holds out one arm as if to reflect the excitement in their triumph that the mask on her face hides.
Minutes later they’d be walking away from the crater, taking a well-worn rocky path down to White Island’s jetty and, they thought, an even more well-worn one beyond, to that place where adventures in interesting places are happy memories to be shared again and again.
They weren’t all together when the eruption began, Browitt would later tell 60 Minutes.
She and her dad were ahead of Krystal, whose birthday the Ovation of the Seas cruise was to celebrate and who’d hung back to chat with the tour guide and take photos.
When black smoke began coming out of the crater they’d posed in front of just seven minutes before, their first reaction was more fascination than fear, Browitt told 60 Minutes.
Krystal, Stephanie and father Paul Browitt. Photos / Supplied
Krystal, Stephanie and father Paul Browitt. Photos / Supplied
“The first thing we did was take a photo, not realising that’s an eruption and the danger, and only a few seconds later we heard the front tour guide ... Hayden [Marshall-Inman] ... yell, ‘Run’.”
Again, Krystal’s cell phone video camera captured the moment.
“S***,” a person can be heard saying as giant plumes of ash and steam explode into the air, towering up to 3.6km over a terrified audience that is also in the path of the volcano’s deadly pyroclastic surge - fast-moving gushes of gases, ash, pumice and rock that destroy, asphyxiate and burn everything in their path.
Browitt, now realising the dire situation they were in, made “a split-second decision just to bolt”.
It was a natural reaction. It was also a hopeless one.
The university graduate and those around her had nowhere to go in the seconds before the full force of the eruption reached them.
White Island’s 321m-high mass of rock is just the tip of a monstrous submarine mountain rising 1.6km from the sea floor.
But that tip, built by continuous volcanic activity over thousands of years, is also a trap.
Raymond Cas, an emeritus professor in the School of Geosciences at Melbourne’s Monash University, and two-time White Island visitor, described the island to Australian media as an “amphitheatre-like trap”.
Browitt began hearing the sound of rocks hitting the ground, and people screaming.
When the force of the eruption reached her - so quickly she didn’t have time to put her gas mask on - she was knocked off her feet and into darkness.
Tumbling and rolling, minutes “felt like forever” and everything was “burning hot”, she told 60 Minutes.
She was convinced she was going to die.
“It was the most terrifying moment of my life.”
By 4.25pm a GeoNet bulletin would describe the eruption as an “impulsive, short-lived event [affecting] the crater floor”.
For those now scattered, injured across White Island’s rocky basin, the terror had barely begun.
Among them was Browitt, struggling to her feet on legs that felt like jelly, walking a bit and then tumbling down a hill, landing among fellow day trippers whose big Kiwi adventure had turned to horror.
Browitt, her family and more than a dozen others close to the crater took the full impact of White Island’s catastrophically timed release of pressure. Just three would survive.
Closer to the jetty, nature had shown similarly scant mercy for the second White Island Tours group, led by five-year veteran Kelsey Waghorn alongside newbie guide Jake Milbank - celebrating his 19th birthday - and about 300m from the crater when the eruption occurred.
Kelsey Waghorn and Jake Milbank. Photos / Supplied
Kelsey Waghorn and Jake Milbank. Photos / Supplied
Waghorn was talking to her group when one said, “Oh, look at that”, the guide told Three documentary The Eruption: Stories of Survival.
For honeymooning American Matt Urey, a boulder offered paltry protection from the serious burns both he and new wife Lauren would suffer.
“I was hiding behind a boulder with my wife, being blasted by scorching hot ash and pelted with rocks,” the 36-year-old later wrote on social media.
Lauren Urey and husband Matthew. Photo / Supplied
Lauren Urey and husband Matthew. Photo / Supplied
“I couldn’t see an inch in front of my face and couldn’t even take a breath because the air was so saturated with dust. Terrifying does not begin to describe those few moments - I genuinely did not think I was going to survive to ever see my beautiful wife’s face again.”
Her body was “literally sizzling”, Lauren Urey, 33, would tell the Daily Mail.
“I was holding Matt’s hand and I just kept telling him I loved him because I thought it was only seconds before we would both die.”
Nearby, New South Wales pensioner John Cozad, who suffered burns to 40 per cent of his body in the eruption, had also taken shelter behind rocks after hearing a “tremendous loud noise”.
“It sounded like a tree breaking in half,” he told 60 Minutes.
“All of a sudden, these hot crystals started hitting me in the forehead,” said the 72-year-old, who was in a coma for weeks after December 9 and whose 43-year-old son Chris Cozad succumbed to his own eruption burns.
They were yelling on the boats, too.
Two passenger-laden White Island Tours catamarans were on the water when the eruption began. One was already well on its way back to the mainland, but the 18.2m Phoenix had left the island just minutes earlier.
Shaky video shot from its stern captured the ever-growing ash plume, and the ever-growing alarm.
says one passenger in Allessandro Kauffmann’s video.
“Go, go, go, go. Please. Go inside, go inside, go inside,” says another, as passengers jostle for the cabin.
At 2.14pm the Phoenix’s skipper sent out an emergency call to Coastguard Whakatāne and, once the immediate danger had passed, steered the catamaran into Te Awapuia Bay, the sheltered access point to the island, to help any survivors.
It wasn’t long before they began to appear, unsteady on their feet and almost universally coated in ash and dust.
Among the survivors was Depauw and his four helicopter passengers, who’d been close to the beach when the eruption occurred.
Depauw told US publication Outside about his life-saving decision to jump into the water, and to tell his clients to do the same.
He and two passengers were able to do so, with Depauw taking a deep breath, ducking under the water and thinking “this is it ... there’s no surviving this” as a black fog came towards him.
Underwater, Depauw saw a dark wave roll across the surface, then everything go black.
“After what he thought was two minutes, the light began to return and Depauw, his lungs aching, burst up into the air.”
Emerging from seawater now coated with yellow dust stinking of sulphur, the young pilot spotted his passengers - three were hurt - and joined the White Island Tours group.
His helicopter was going nowhere.
Not only had the 1.2-tonne Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel been blasted off its landing pad behind the ruins of the old sulphur factory, the now ash-caked machine’s main rotor blades were buckled and half its tail rotor was buried under ash.
By now, the first help was arriving, with White Island Tours manager Paul Kingi ferrying survivors from the jetty to the Phoenix by inflatable dinghy.
Tourists covered in ash are taken to safety. Photos / Michael Schade
Tourists covered in ash are taken to safety. Photos / Michael Schade
Tourists covered in ash are taken to safety. Photos / Michael Schade
Tourists covered in ash are taken to safety. Photos / Michael Schade
Tourists covered in ash are taken to safety. Photos / Michael Schade
Tourists covered in ash are taken to safety. Photos / Michael Schade
Among them was Waghorn, covered in ash and moving unsteadily - the 25-year-old had third degree burns to 45 per cent of her body. Milbank, eyesight blurry from ash, was also coated in the powdery eruption residue and, with burns to 80 per cent of his body, could see some of his skin hanging off.
“I went to grab one of the rails on the wharf,” he told Eruption: Stories of Survival.
“And the skin on my palm just slid off.”
Kelsey Waghorn. Photo / Supplied
Kelsey Waghorn. Photo / Supplied
On a final sweep of the island looking for survivors, Kingi came across Sydney teen Jesse Langford, the sole survivor of his family of four, who’d been among the tour group closest to the crater when White Island blew.
The 19-year-old had burns to 90 per cent of his body, but was on his feet and trying to get to safety.
Jesse Langford. Photo / Supplied
Jesse Langford. Photo / Supplied
Every part of him appeared burned to Kingi, who made another trip on an inflatable dinghy to pick up Langford.
One of those sombre rescue journeys, set against a now dusty-grey disaster zone in an already otherworldly landscape, would be captured by American tourist Michael Schade in a photo that went around the world.
The timestamp read 2.24pm.
Just 13 minutes had passed since White Island had played its most lethal hand.
On the Phoenix, the journey to safety had just begun for the survivors.
A 90-minute boat ride to Whakatāne lay ahead with the only medical care that what could be provided by crew and passengers.
The journey was “agonising”, Matt Urey told 60 Minutes.
“We were all burned horribly. We were laying in the sun being splashed with salt water and ice-cold air while we were completely burned.
“It was excruciatingly painful.”
Those on board gave what they could to help - from first aid to the clothes off their backs.
Among those caring for the survivors was Hamilton pastor Geoff Hopkins and his 22-year-old daughter, Lillani.
Geoff Hopkins and Lillani Hopkins. Photo / Supplied
Geoff Hopkins and Lillani Hopkins. Photo / Supplied
Freshwater was poured over the survivors’ scalded skin as they lay prone on Phoenix’s decks, and some drifted in and out of consciousness. Hopkins told the injured - most clad only in shorts and T-shirts - “everything’s alright”.
He knew it wasn’t.
Most of the 23 injured taken on to the Phoenix were “horrifically burnt” and screaming in pain, Hopkins told the Herald.
As Lillani sang softly to calm the injured, some asked Hopkins, ‘Can you hold my hand?’, he told The Eruption: Stories of Survival.
“I couldn’t, because there wasn’t much of a hand to hold.”
Halfway back to the mainland, a Coastguard boat dropped off paramedics who tried to give the survivors - five of whom were considered critically ill - pain relief, but they struggled to find veins under the survivors’ burned skin as the catamaran bounced over the waves.
By now, some of the injured were going into shock and becoming cold. Instead of asking for water to pour on burns, the 30 or so passengers on Phoenix were asked for their coats and jackets, Hopkins
says.
“People were taking their T-shirts off to give us clothes to try and keep people warm. I remember three Asian tourists huddled together under a big waterproof duffel bag.”
Ambulances wait at the Whakatane wharf. Photo / Katee Shanks
Ambulances wait at the Whakatane wharf. Photo / Katee Shanks
Photo / Katee Shanks
Photo / Katee Shanks
By 4.15pm the Phoenix was back in Whakatāne, met by a crowd of emergency responders and worried locals.
“Our last memory was seeing people offloaded off the dock at Whakatāne,” Hopkins says.
“They were taken away in an ambulance and that was it.”
Back in the abyss that was White Island’s crater, only Langford had managed to escape to safety.
Twenty others - men, women and children - lay dead, dying and injured.
Their guides, 40-year-old Marshall-Inman and Tipene Maangi, 24, had, in their courageous last moments tried to help those in their care, ensuring tourists were wearing gas masks and were given some first aid.
Marshall-Inman and Tipene Maangi. Photos / Supplied
Marshall-Inman and Tipene Maangi. Photos / Supplied
The body of Maangi, a chronic asthmatic, was found without a mask, his grandmother Ngaroahiahi Patuwai Maangi told the Herald.
It’s not known if he gave it to a tourist or dropped it in the rush to try and get to safety.
“What I did hear was when they last saw Tipene he was the only one without a mask and he was holding his asthma pump.”
Helicopter pilot Tom Storey, who took part in a civilian rescue mission for those trapped near the crater, is convinced the two guides helped save lives.
“It was pretty clear they’d survived the initial eruption and had helped [the first survivors we found],” Storey told RNZ.
“I think one of the main reasons we found the first group of survivors was because of those two guys’ heroic actions.”
Browitt, who had tumbled down into a group of fellow survivors in the minutes after the eruption, told ABC’s Four Corners of the agonising wait for help - lasting more than an hour - as the crater continued rumbling and spewing out ash and debris.
“Everyone was just on the ground. There was one person lying flat on their belly just spread out, who was screaming in pain, and another person who was yelling for help.
“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know why people are yelling ... there’s just no one near us, we’re on an island in the middle of the ocean’.”
White Island’s location - 48km and a choppy 90-minute boat ride from the mainland - had surprised her when the family boarded White Island’s newest addition, Te Puia Whakaari, almost three hours earlier.
“I didn’t realise how lonesome it was and how far out into the ocean it was,” she told 60 Minutes.
She had no idea where Krystal was - the veterinary nursing student would later be confirmed among the dead - but she could hear her dad.
He would succumb to his injuries in a Melbourne hospital weeks later, but for now Paul Browitt was calling out her name every 15 to 20 minutes, Browitt told Four Corners.
Hope for those who had experienced the full horror of White Island’s power would, eventually, come from above.
Emergency services had scrambled from across the North Island, and the fleet of 11 search and rescue helicopters which arrived in Whakatāne that afternoon could have reached White Island in about 20 minutes.
But authorities chose not to send them, deeming the island too dangerous to land on.
So when help came for Browitt, and the other injured tourists, it came from commercial helicopter pilots at Kahu NZ and Volcanic Air.
The tourists were easy to see as he descended to 60m in the crater, Kahu NZ chief executive and pilot Mark Law told The Guardian.
Mark Law. Photo / Chris Gee
Mark Law. Photo / Chris Gee
“They were lying down or spreadeagled ... we both landed in the centre of the island where we felt it was ok. It was ashing, but we could deal with it.
“We were moving around tending to people who were in real distress. We wanted to reassure them. We found people dead, dying and alive but in various states of unconsciousness ... it was pretty quiet. The only real words were things like, ‘Help’.”
Fellow pilot Tom Storey, in a second Kahu helicopter being flown by Jason Hill, would later describe to TVNZ the challenges posed by the dust in the air and underfoot.
“It felt like running through talcum powder. It was very hard to breathe and without a gas mask we were gasping for air.”
Arriving soon after Law, Hill and Storey was Volcanic Air director and chief pilot Tim Barrow, with crewman and fellow pilot Graeme Hopcroft.
Tim Barrow. Photo / Tim Barrow
Tim Barrow. Photo / Tim Barrow
What they saw when they landed was “carnage”, Barrow told the Rotorua Daily Post.
“It was steamy, it was quite hard to breathe - the gas masks were invaluable. Once we got to the centre of the crater, there were bodies and victims. There were injured in various states, obviously in distress.”
One survivor was so badly burned Barrow didn’t know if the person was male or female. With help from Hopcroft they carried the person on their shoulders to their helicopter, before returning to retrieve more survivors.
Between the seven rescuers - a second Volcanic Air helicopter with Sam Jones and Callum Mill had also arrived on the island to help - 12 survivors (one would succumb in Barrow’s helicopter before reaching the mainland) were scooped up and put into three of the helicopters.
Among them was Browitt, carefully carried to Hill’s aircraft after her dad told their rescuers to take his daughter first.
She’d earlier heard Law trying to comfort the injured after landing on the island.
“He was yelling, ‘It’s OK, it’s going to be OK. Everyone’s going to be OK, help is coming’,” Browitt told Four Corners.
For some, it was too late. For others, it soon would be - one young woman died in Storey’s arms as he carried her to the helicopter.
“She was holding onto me, then she went all limp,” Outside reported.
Sitting in the front seat of a helicopter while four others were put in the back, Browitt, who suffered burns to 70 per cent of her body and lost part of her fingers, was surprised by the lack of medical equipment and crew.
“Now I realise rescue actually wasn’t coming. It was just three [sic] pilots who chose to risk their own lives to help us and if they hadn’t come, we’d all be gone.”
On the 20-minute flight to Whakatāne, Browitt found herself wanting to go to sleep, she told Four Corners.
“I was just rocking back and forth, and nearly just falling over, crouching over and the pilot was like, ‘Stay awake. You’re going to be ok. Just stay awake’.”
Many of the stories of what happened on White Island a year ago this week will never be known.
Twenty-two people died as a result of the eruption, two-thirds on the day it occurred. The most recent death, of 64-year-old Horst Westenfelder in an overseas hospital on July 2, was announced by New Zealand police last week.
An entire Australian-American family - Sydney-based Martin and Barbara Hollander and their 13- and 16-year-old sons Matthew and Berend - did not survive.
The Hollander family: Barbara Hollander, Matthew Hollander, Berend Hollander and Martin Hollander. Photo / Supplied
The Hollander family: Barbara Hollander, Matthew Hollander, Berend Hollander and Martin Hollander. Photo / Supplied
Three young American children are growing up without parents after Pratap and Mayuri Singh succumbed to their injuries in hospital.
Pratap Singh and wife Mayuari Singh from Atlanta, Georgia. Photo / Supplied
Pratap Singh and wife Mayuari Singh from Atlanta, Georgia. Photo / Supplied
Young New South Wales couple Richard Elzer and Karla Mathews died lying next to each other; their friend Jason Griffiths would lose his own fight for life in hospital less than 48 hours later.
Karla Mathews and Richard Elzer. Photo / Supplied
Karla Mathews and Richard Elzer. Photo / Supplied
Brisbane mother and daughter Julie and Jessica Richards had joked with family about racing each other to the crater “to see who could throw the biggest stone into the volcano”, Julie Richards’ sister-in-law Jen Ebron told a vigil after the 47- and 20-year-old were confirmed dead.
Julie Richards (right) and daughter Jessica Richards. Photo / Supplied
Julie Richards (right) and daughter Jessica Richards. Photo / Supplied
For the 26 survivors, some don’t want, or haven’t felt ready, to talk publicly about the moment a volcano blacked out the sun and turned a day of pleasurable discovery into a fight for survival.
But they don’t forget.
One survivor’s relative told the Weekend Herald their family member remembered “everything that happened”, from feeling his skin melting off his fingers immediately after the eruption to the agonising boat journey across the water to Whakatāne.
“He remembers every step he took. He lives with those memories every day.”
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