The Māori wardens who have guarded the cordon around Mount Maunganui since the landslide that killed six people in January say they have been spat at, pelted with bottles and food, and left to build their own shelter out of tarpaulins and timber. Their account, reported by Local Democracy Reporting for RNZ, 1News and the NZ Herald this weekend, comes as Tauranga City Council’s own figures show it has spent more than $800,000 on security at the mountain and more than $5.1 million on the response and recovery overall.
Mauao, the Māori name for the mountain at the end of the Mount Maunganui peninsula, has been closed to the public since the morning of 22 January, when heavy rain sent part of the hillside down onto the Beachside Holiday Park at its base. The wardens of the Ngā Wātene Māori o Mauao Charitable Trust were at the mountain by 8am that day. Chairwoman Sophie Te Moni told Local Democracy Reporting that 12 volunteers turned out at the start and that the trust has not stopped since. “From that day forward, we’ve been working 24/7,” she said.
The trust is contracted by the council to provide security at the cordon, with the council’s payment described as a koha that covers fuel, meals, uniforms and wet weather gear. The wardens work in shifts around the base of the mountain, write daily reports and, according to the council, pass those reports on only when there has been a breach or a health and safety concern.
The abuse, the wardens say, has mostly come from locals rather than visitors. Coordinator Katrina Hoko put it bluntly. “We’ve been spat at,” she said. Te Moni said the trust’s instruction to its people was to keep their composure no matter what was thrown at them. “I say, just be polite and they won’t come back.”
Breaches of the cordon have usually involved young people, and one in particular has stayed with the wardens. Te Moni described watching three boys climb to the top of the main landslide while nobody could follow them in. “It was so scary because we could see them and the police refused to go in because it was a dangerous area,” she said. Western Bay of Plenty Police area commander Inspector Clifford Paxton said three young men who breached the cordon on 11 February were later arrested, charged under the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act and pleaded guilty. Two were fined $800 each and the third is due in court in January. Paxton said the cordons are clearly signposted and monitored by CCTV. “They are in place to protect public safety, and there is no excuse for breaching them,” he said.
The shelter has become the visible symbol of the wardens’ complaint. The trust first hired a caravan on the Pilot Bay side of the mountain, then bought gazebos, which Te Moni said were “blown away” in the wind. What stands at the cordon now is a structure the wardens built themselves from tarpaulins, metal framing, timber posts, rope and cord. “Since then my crew constructed that thing that’s out there,” Te Moni said. “It’s quite ugly, but it’s the only kind of shelter they could put up themselves that stayed there.” The reporting describes it as resembling a homeless shelter, and the trust is now taking it down.
The council does not dispute the picture. Its recovery manager for the landslide, Charlie Rahiri, described the wardens’ facilities as “not ideal” and said the trust’s contract requires welfare items including temporary shelter. “The council is working with Ngā Watene Māori o Mauao to repair and/or replace this structure that has been damaged,” he said. Rahiri also acknowledged what he called “unacceptable and disrespectful behaviour such as throwing bottles and food at wardens” in January, and said security remained necessary because Mauao was still a high-risk area and an active recovery site where breaches were continuing.
The warden presence has already been cut back. Rahiri said the reduction from seven wardens to two at the Mount Main Beach end was a trial, because breaches of the fencing at Pilot Bay had decreased. The wardens’ own view, as reported, is that they are there to protect the mountain as much as the public. “We look after him to make sure that he’s not being disrespected,” one said.
The money involved is set out in a council progress report dated 1 September. It records $192,919 spent on security during the initial response to the January storm and a further $645,723 on security for the ongoing recovery, a combined total of more than $838,000. The report puts total response and recovery expenses at more than $5.1 million. Those figures sit alongside the council’s wider bill for the disaster. NEWS WIRE reported in August that an independent review had found the landslide was preventable, and in September that the council accepted that review in full, with councillors pressing staff on how warnings about the hazard had been filed and forgotten.
Nine months on, the mountain is still shut. Repairs to the summit 4WD track, Te Ara Motukauri, were finished in July, and work then moved to the harder job of restoring the base track, Te Ara Tūtanga. In mid September Mayor Mahé Drysdale told a community meeting that the summit route, the stairs track and some sections of the base track were likely to open for summer, though no date has been set. “Summer is a good target to have and hopefully it’ll be early summer rather than late summer,” he said, according to 1News. The summit will not reopen until two access routes are available, so that people can be got out in an emergency, and Rahiri has warned that rockfall and track risk assessments could still push the timetable back. The council has said it will not wait for the Government’s inquiry into the slip, whose findings are not expected until February.
Some of the surrounding facilities are already back in use. The boat ramp and the surf club on Adams Avenue have reopened, the Mount Maunganui Lifeguard Service was due back in its building in September, and Adams Avenue will no longer be closed during the heaviest rainfall alerts because mitigation work is in place. The holiday park where the six people died remains closed, and Drysdale told the September meeting that “the campground is looking hard”.
Until the tracks reopen, the wardens will stay at the cordon. The council says it is repairing or replacing their shelter. The wardens say they will keep being polite. Whether the people of Mount Maunganui, nine months into losing their mountain, will return the courtesy is another question.
Have you been up to the Mount cordon this year, or do you know the wardens working there? Tell us what you have seen 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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