If the Mount Maunganui landslide risk was known, why was nothing done? – The Front Page
The Mount Maunganui landslide has been described as “preventable”.
A damning review of the disaster has revealed a litany of failures by authorities who “missed several opportunities” to evacuate campers to safety.
Six people died after the slip crashed into the campground on January 22.
It’s now been revealed that over decades, “one consultant after another” warned Tauranga City Council of the risks at the holiday spot at the bottom of the mountain.
University of Canterbury senior lecturer in disaster risk and resilience, Dr Tom Robinson, told The Front Page that the external review examined events over more than 25 years, dating back to 1999.
“It makes a series of really quite compelling recommendations ... 25 years of knowing that this site had this risk and even had suggested [taking action] as recently as 2025, six months before it.
“It really clearly sets out that we knew about this or we should have known about this. This is not a failure in our knowledge or our understanding. This is a failure in our systems to act upon that knowledge, and I think that’s a really striking thing that we should look at.
“Not just the Tauranga City Council, but all councils, and at a national Government level. A look at this is not a failure of knowledge; this is a failure of systems,” he said.
This report by former High Court Judge Paul Davison, KC, is the first of five investigations into the slip. Reports are still to come from the Government, WorkSafe, police and the coroner.
Davison’s final thoughts said his review had been “sobering in its simplicity”.
“This was not a hazard that was unknown, hidden or beyond the reach of foresight.
“For more than two decades, one competent consultant after another identified the landslide hazard to the campground.”
Davison said the review did not find any individual accountable.
“That’s a question for some of those later reports that are coming through and looking at it specifically.
“From what I gather from reading the report, I would tend to agree that the buck doesn’t stop with one person. And that’s because this is a systematic failure.
“There are multiple failings, not in people or in their jobs, but in the way the system allows information to flow between who owns that, who takes responsibility for that, who’s actually responsible for making and acting upon decisions. It’s very clear that that’s the flaw here.
“I think the phrase that sticks out to me there was that what was missing was not knowledge or even the means to act on it; it was the ability to convert that knowledge to decisions, and that’s not a person; that is a system error that we need to change.
“That’s something that is true for all of our councils, for all of our risk-based systems here. We actually know a lot about our hazards and risks. We always want to know more, but we probably understand a lot of them relatively well.
“What we lack is that ability to make decisions on them, consistent decisions. That requires setting thresholds of risk.
“That can’t be something that’s left up to individual councils, because then you end up with councils making different decisions around their risk and taking very different actions.
“There needs to be some higher level guidance that allows them to make those decisions and act upon them,” he said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- Repeated warnings
- Decision-making
- New Zealand’s recurring failures
- Systems.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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