Financial help available

ACC will fund the emergency care of international visitors and New Zealand residents injured in the Whakaari/White Island volcanic eruption.

It can also help with the costs of getting the bodies of international visitors back home.

However, it’s up to the travel insurers, overseas governments and families of injured international visitors to fund their flights back home, even if they have to go via an expensive air ambulance service.

All emergency and hospital care for visitors to New Zealand injured while in the country is covered by ACC, but ACC funeral grants, and survivor grants, are available to the overseas families of visitors who die as a result of injuries in New Zealand, and they can be used to help pay to repatriate bodies, or ashes.

Of the 47 people on Whakaari/ White Island at the time of the eruption on Monday afternoon, at least six had died, many were injured, including 25 critically, and eight were missing, presumed dead.

Three Australians were believed to be among the six confirmed dead, as well as a Malaysian, according to Australian media outlet News.com.au.

ACC has issued a fact sheet detailing help for the injured, and for the families of the dead.

It said ACC would pay a nontaxable funeral grant of up to $6311 towards funeral costs of each person killed in the eruption.

ACC spokesman Jonathan Underhill said there were precedents for families to use funeral grant money to help return bodies to their home countries.

‘‘Everyone gets the same funeral grant irrespective of whether a body needs to be repatriated.’’

The survivor’s grant is a oneoff non-taxable payment to the deceased’s partner, children and dependants of $6766.72 to the spouse or partner, and $3383.38 to each child under 18, or other dependants of the dead person.

Deaths last year in Hawke’s Bay of Indian-born Hemin Limbachiya and French tourist Pierre Paludet highlighted the typical repatriation costs of between about $10,000 and $15,000.

That included the cost of embalming the bodies, and the hermetically-sealed caskets they must travel in, which must be arranged through a funeral homes. People could carry loved ones’ ashes on planes with no restrictions after a New Zealand cremation.

Injured people travelling to their home countries can sometimes travel by commercial flights, but in serious injuries air ambulances, which can cost $100,000-plus, may be needed.