An independent review released today has found the landslide that killed six people at the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park in January was preventable, and that the danger had been described to Tauranga City Council by one consultant after another for more than 25 years.
Retired High Court judge Paul Davison KC was appointed in February to examine what the council knew and what it did about the slope above the campground. His report was made public this afternoon. It concluded that the failure was organisational rather than the fault of any one person, and that the warnings on the morning of 22 January arrived early and from several directions.
“This was not a hazard that was unknown, hidden, or beyond the reach of foresight,” the report said. Davison found that geotechnical advice identifying the risk to the campground went back to 1999, with further warnings in 2005 and 2006, again in December 2023, and again in June 2025. None of the recommendations that came with that advice were put in place.
Six people died when the slope collapsed at about 9.30am. They were Morrinsville teacher Lisa Anne Maclennan, 50, Swedish visitor Måns Loke Bernhardsson, 20, Jacqualine Suzanne Wheeler, 71, and Susan Doreen Knowles, 71, both of the Rotorua area, and Auckland students Sharon Maccanico and Max Furse-Kee, both 15. A separate slip on Welcome Bay Road the same morning killed a grandmother and her grandson.
The rain that weekend was extraordinary. About 295 millimetres fell over 21 and 22 January, roughly two months of rain in under 12 hours and the heaviest fall the area had seen in 20 years. MetService issued a red warning on 21 January. The review treats that warning as the first of several points at which campers could have been moved.
The second came at about 4.30am, when small slips came down behind the campervans at the back of the park. One of them struck the vehicle Lisa Maclennan was sleeping in with her husband Travis. According to the review, they rang the holiday park at 4.43am and reached a security guard who told them no staff were on site. The pair spent the next hour trying to raise someone who could act. A council welfare team treated the call as an accommodation problem rather than a safety one.
Maclennan began photographing the damage at 6.17am and kept documenting the slope as conditions worsened. By 8.08am, muddy water was running off the hill, which geotechnical experts had earlier described as a classic sign that a slope is about to give way. That was the third missed opportunity. The campground manager offered refunds and repairs but no decision was made to evacuate. Just before 9.30am the slope failed, and it failed in seconds, striking the amenities block where Maclennan was showering with two other people.
In a statement reported by 1News, Travis Maclennan said the report “highlights Lisa’s extraordinary and selfless actions” and that she “went to heroic lengths to help those around her”. Campers who survived have credited her with waking them and telling them the bank above was coming apart.
Much of the review turns on a document that did not exist. Consultants had recommended a trigger action response plan, a simple set of rules that tells staff what to do when a defined trigger occurs, such as forecast extreme rainfall or muddy water coming off a slope. Had one been in place, Davison found, an evacuation would very likely have happened well before the fatal slide. Campground staff had never been trained to recognise the warning signs at all.
The council employed a qualified natural hazards specialist. That person, the review found, was entirely unaware of the 2023 and 2025 geotechnical reports identifying the risk to the campground and only learned of them after the disaster. Davison described that as a feature of the way the council operated rather than a one off oversight.
He made 10 recommendations aimed at the council and a further five directed at emergency response agencies. They include putting a single named owner on every risk that crosses internal boundaries, keeping a central register of geotechnical and natural hazard reports, requiring expert advice to be recorded, escalated and tracked, assessing risk against clear tolerability criteria, and maintaining trigger action response plans for every populated site sitting under a known hazard.
Mayor Mahé Drysdale, who called for the review with his councillors in February, said the findings were clear and deeply confronting, and that “our organisation should have done better”. He apologised to the families and to everyone in the community who had been put at risk over 27 years, and said the council accepts all of the findings and recommendations.
Chief executive Marty Grenfell told the release, as reported by SunLive, “I am sorry that the organisation has over many years failed to take appropriate steps to manage the risk to the campground.” Asked whether he would resign, Grenfell said it was a fair question but did not answer it directly, saying his focus was on implementing the recommendations. A road map setting out the council’s next steps is due on 1 September.
Davison did not find that tree removal on the hillside in 2019 caused the collapse.
The mountain, the campground and the neighbouring Mount Hot Pools are all still closed. Adams Avenue and the boat ramp were shut again last month after about 8000 cubic metres of material moved on the slip face. The council hopes to reopen them by the end of August using shipping containers and rock filled barriers as protection. What happens to the campground itself has not been decided.
This is the first of five investigations to report. A government inquiry led by retired Supreme Court judge Sir Mark O’Regan is looking at both of the fatal landslides that morning and is due to deliver its final report in December. WorkSafe, police and the Coroner are each running their own inquiries.
What do you think should happen to the Mount Maunganui campground now that the review has reported? Share your view in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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