Difficult task to rescue injured caver
Four cave rescue specialists yesterday afternoon reached a woman who was injured after falling into Harwoods Hole, the deepest vertical shaft in New Zealand.
It was expected to take between one to two hours for the team to extract the patient.
Acting Senior Sergeant Brett Currie said the woman had serious arm and hand injuries after falling partway down the hole.
She also had possible head injuries but they are not expected to be life-threatening.
The woman was stranded near the bottom of the hole.
The woman would be winched back up the shaft by hand and then flown by rescue helicopter to hospital.
‘‘The main limitation is the terrain here. It’s a very big hole and it requires specialist caving equipment and resources to enter and make the extraction,’’ Currie said.
Two other people in the woman’s party reached the bottom of the cave safely.
They would be escorted out of the cave through the cave system, Currie said.
The Westpac rescue helicopter from Wellington had dropped off a search and rescue party, and were returning to drop a second group.
Police said the team would be hooking up communication equipment to be able to talk to the crew from the top of the cave.
Senior Sergeant Blair Hall, of Nelson, said emergency services received reports of a caving accident at the hole on top of Takaka Hill, northwest of Nelson, at 12.15pm yesterday.
Police said the alarm was raised by a group in the area and a helicopter was sent to the scene. Cave rescue specialists, the fire service and St John Ambulance were also involved.
Reeve said he understood local cavers had also been called to assist in the rescue operation.
Harwoods Hole is a 176-metre deep sinkhole.
It drops to an underground river that emerges below and flows into Gorge Creek and then into the Takaka River.
Several scenes from Sir Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy were filmed in the complex of caves at the bottom of the shaft.
It is situated in a remote part of Takaka Hill in Golden Bay with little to no cellphone reception.