‘I’ll never forget it’
Three injured children pulled to safety as wreckage threatens to go up in flames
• Two adults are dead and three children seriously injured after a family helicopter trip for a summer lunch in the small South Island settlement of Kēkerengū turned to tragedy when the aircraft plunged into the water.
• Hero locals hauled the smoking wreckage onto the beach with a tractor before pulling the occupants out. Ian Mehrtens carried a young girl to safety who was crying for her mother: ‘ I’ll never forget it . . . the old instinct took over and I just went’.
• Investigators will comb through the wreckage this morning as they work to understand the circumstances that led to the crash.
Ian Mehrtens spent his 69th birthday pulling dead and wounded people from the wreckage of a helicopter crash across the road from his Kekerengu home — and there’s one image that will stay with him forever.
“The wee dolly . . . the little girl that was hurt, her doll was in the surf and I just picked it up,” Mehrtens said.
“I carried the wee girl up the beach to where her mum was lying. She was asking me ‘ where’s my mummy ... is my mummy alright’ and I said ‘yeah she’s alright’, but she was far from it.”
Two people were killed when the chopper crashed onto the beach at about 12.40pm yesterday and three children were badly injured.
It was reported yesterday that a family had flown north from Christchurch for an idyllic lunch.
Mehrtens and other locals rushed to the scene and began hauling the victims out, terrified the smoking wreckage would go up in flames at any moment.
He said the pilot was obviously dead and an adult woman was “not looking good”.
Three children who he believed were her kids were injured and pulled to safety including a teenage girl with broken legs and a boy.
Mehrtens and his wife Lyn own a lodge opposite the beach where the crash happened — in front of the Kekerengu Store and camp, 30km north of Kaikoura.
They were standing in the kitchen with a friend watching the chopper land when suddenly something went terribly wrong.
“It was just coming in to land and I thought he was putting on a display for the passengers, showing them how the helicopter worked,” Mehrtens said.
“It started spinning . . . then it just disappeared . . . clunk . . . bang. I thought, ‘ S***, oh my God’ — it just nosedived down and I thought, ‘Crikey, they are going to need some help.”
He jumped on his quad bike and headed to the beach, meeting his neighbour and mate — who asked not to be named in this story — on his tractor.
The chopper had gone down in the water so the men — helped by locals, campers and tourists — tied a rope to the tail and dragged it from the surf onto the beach.
Then they started frantically pulling people out.
They retrieved the pilot last, laying him on the beach and covering his face with a blanket — placing rocks around it so the coastal wind did not blow it away.
“I didn’t want to see that,” Mehrtens said. “The poor bugger . . . something must have gone really wrong.”
He said the helicopter crumpled “like tissue” and his wife described it as being “like tinfoil”.
“It just all of a sudden altered course . . . there was a big crack and I thought maybe it landed on its runners and they were buggered, but no,” Mehrtens recalled.
She was asking me ‘where’s my mummy . . . is my mummy alright’ and I said ‘yeah she’s alright’, but she was far from it.
Ian Mehrtens
“[The kids] were screaming in pain . . . The older girl, she wasn’t good.
“There were six of us trying to get them out — the worst part was trying to get them out of their seatbelts.”
Mehrtens turned 69 yesterday and being part of a dramatic and tragic rescue was not part of his plan.
He worked as a first responder for years, pulling people from wrecked and burning cars, but never anything like this.
But don’t call him a hero. “Far from it, there were other guys there . . . yeah of course I would [do it again],” he said.
“I’ll never forget it . . . the old instinct took over and I just went.”
Lyn Mehrtens said she was proud of her husband and disagreed that he was not a hero.
“How many people did you pull out of that thing?” she said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
The Transport Accident Investigation Commission (TAIC) has opened an inquiry into the accident, with three investigators to arrive on the scene this morning.
The helicopter was an EC120 and is understood to have come from Christchurch.
Harald Hendel, TAIC’s chief investigator of accidents, said there may be people who saw what happened, given the location of the accident adjacent to a busy cafe´ on State Highway 1. He appealed for witnesses — “especially anyone who may have captured the accident on their vehicle’s dash-cam or other recording device — to please contact TAIC as soon as possible”.
They have set up a perimeter around the wreckage prohibiting public access in order to protect evidence.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) operational insurance team member Darryl Papesch was one of the first responders on the scene and said locals had pulled everyone out of the wreck by the time he arrived.
He confirmed the three survivors were children, who were flown to Wellington Hospital for treatment.
“We were having conversations with them, not a proper conversation but they knew their names and how old they were,” Papesch said.
“The locals were outstanding, in a chaotic situation they were outstanding.”
A hearse arrived at the scene last night at dusk to pick up the dead.
Another witness said the crash was “awful, just terrible”.
“Either something’s gone really wrong with that helicopter or there’s been something wrong with the pilot, a medical situation maybe.”