The government inquiry into the landslides that killed eight people in Tauranga in January has given the public another three weeks to come forward, pushing the deadline for submissions out to 5pm on Friday 4 September.
The extension was announced on Friday by the Department of Internal Affairs, which is providing administrative support to the inquiry. The chair, retired Supreme Court judge Sir Mark O’Regan, said the panel had already received useful material and wanted more of it. “We have received thoughtful and informative submissions from people with a wide range of knowledge, experience and perspectives,” he said in the statement announcing the extension.
The two landslides happened on 22 January, at the end of a night that dumped 274mm of rain on Tauranga in the 24 hours to 9am, the wettest day ever recorded in the city and something close to two and a half months of normal rainfall in a single go. The first slide came down at about 4.15am onto a property on Welcome Bay Road, killing two people. The second came down at about 9.30am off the flanks of Mount Maunganui onto the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park, killing six. Researchers later mapped 42 separate landslides on the mountain from that one storm.
Sir Mark is joined on the panel by Dr Helen Anderson, a former government chief science adviser, and Steve Symon, a lawyer with experience in workplace safety investigations. The three of them started considering evidence on 30 March and are required to hand over a final report with recommendations by 3 December.
The terms of reference ask three questions. How did the landslides happen, taking in the shape and geology of the slopes, the weather, previous slips and any changes to vegetation. Did the agencies responsible take appropriate steps to manage the risk in the period immediately beforehand, including any steps to warn or evacuate the people who were in the way. And what lessons can be applied so it does not happen again. The agencies whose conduct is being examined include Tauranga City Council, Bay of Plenty Regional Council, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, the police and the Mauao Trust, which has responsibilities for the mountain itself.
Just as important is what the inquiry has been told to leave alone. It is not assessing the rescue and recovery operation. It is not determining civil, criminal or disciplinary liability against anybody. And it is not to repeat ground already covered by the separate inquiry into the North Island severe weather events. That is a narrower brief than some families might have expected, and it means the report will land as a set of findings about warning systems and risk management rather than a verdict on anyone in particular.
The panel has asked for material that ordinary people are more likely to hold than any agency does. Photographs and video from the days before the slides, drone footage, rain gauge readings from home weather stations, and anything else relevant that has not already been handed to the police or another agency. Submissions go through an online portal run by Internal Affairs.
There is a political timetable sitting underneath all of this that is worth noticing. The report is due on 3 December. The general election is on 7 November. Whatever Sir Mark and his colleagues recommend about hazard mapping, warning systems, evacuation powers and who is supposed to make the call when a hillside is saturated will therefore be delivered to a government formed four weeks earlier, and quite possibly not the one that set the inquiry up. Recommendations of this kind usually require somebody to change a rule, fund a piece of monitoring or tell a council it now has a duty it did not have before, and that work will fall to whoever is holding the emergency management portfolio in December. If you want to see where the parties stand before you vote, our voting tool lets you compare their positions.
The minister who set the terms of reference has already gone. Chris Penk, the associate minister for emergency management and recovery at the time, signed off the scope in March and said then that “it is my expectation that this engagement will be conducted with respect and sensitivity”. On Wednesday he lost every one of his portfolios after a failed leadership challenge and said he would not seek re-election. Mark Mitchell has held the senior emergency management and recovery role throughout.
The wider point the inquiry is circling is one that geologists have been making for years without much traction. Writing the day after the Mount Maunganui slide, University of Auckland applied geology professor Martin Brook noted that landslides have killed more New Zealanders since written records began in 1843 than earthquakes and volcanic eruptions combined, which is not how most of us rank our hazards. Earthquakes get the building code and the public education campaigns. Slopes get a line in a district plan and, in a lot of places, no monitoring at all until something moves.
Tauranga is still living with the physical consequences. The mountain was closed for months while crews stabilised the slopes, and repair work on the tracks has run through this winter, with the summit track finished in July and the harder work on the base track only starting after that. Fresh slips came down in the July cold snap. The holiday park below the northern face has not reopened.
Anyone who was in Tauranga that week, who took photographs, who noticed water coming off the hill in an unusual place, or who reported something to a council or a landlord and got no response, has until 4 September to put it in front of the panel. Material of that kind is often what turns a report from a summary of what agencies say they did into a record of what actually happened.
Were you in Tauranga in January, or do you live below a slope you have concerns about. Tell us 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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