Review

• Published date: 05 December 2020
• Date: 05 December 2020
• Publication title: Daily Post, The (Rotorua, New Zealand)

“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.

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.

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”.

There were signs something was going on.

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.

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.

“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 visitor to White Island, described the island to Australian media as an “amphitheatre-like trap”. “There is no escape from [it] when an eruption occurs.”

Browitt...