Bus had failed nine inspections
The bus that crashed on Mt Ruapehu on Saturday was 24 years old, had done more than a quarter of a million kilometres and had failed nine inspections in the space of a decade.
The 1994 Mitsubishi Fuso bus crashed on its way down from the Turoa skifield on Saturday, killing 11-year-old Hannah Teresa Francis, of Auckland, and injuring 20 others.
Passengers said it appeared the brakes had failed. A police crash investigation is under way.
Several people have complained about the state of some of the buses being used by Ruapehu Alpine Lifts (RAL) to ferry passengers to Turoa and Whakapapa skifields.
Wellington woman Jane Ye, a frequent mountain visitor, said she caught the same bus on the Saturday morning.
‘‘It’s old, it’s very, very old,’’ she said. She said even though she caught the bus up the mountain she didn’t trust it, so caught a ride with someone else back down.
Ye wrote to local council and government officials last year over concerns with the bus service. She said RAL did a good job with what they had, but their money went into making the mountain safe for skiing, not the buses.
Ye believed someone else should have stepped in to manage the buses and help promote tourism in the area rather than stretching RAL’s resources.
RAL said it would not comment on the state of the bus while an investigation was under way. The Japanese import bus failed Certificate of Fitness inspections nine times between 2005 and 2016, but the reasons for failing were not given. It had a current certificate when it crashed.
The vehicle had done
277,885km as of May 31.
An AA vehicle history report on the bus noted it had ‘‘inconsistent’’ odometer readings.
The reading went backwards from 199,639km in July 2010 to
118,044km in May 2011.
The report says reasons for this could be the odometer has gone around-the-clock and reset back to zero, it may have been tampered with and manually wound back by someone trying to misrepresent the vehicle or the reading had been incorrectly entered into the records.
Colin Baker, who owns Ruapehu Scenic Shuttles and has been feuding with RAL since he was turned down for a driving position with the company a couple of years ago, questions the maintenance on RAL’s buses.
He claims some are not fit to take passengers.
They had originally been used as staff transport but were now getting a ‘‘hard workout’’ ferrying skiers up and down the mountain during winter.
‘‘I’ve heard the drivers at Turoa don’t like driving them,’’ he said.
‘‘I knew the vehicles had issues. One of the reasons I was concerned about [potentially] working over there was the long hours and the condition of the buses.’’
Baker said with drivers under pressure to fit into a schedule and the buses being driven harder, maintenance was bound to suffer.
‘‘I think it’s a wake-up call for them and every operator in the area – the repercussions are going to be huge.’’
Local shuttle operators are upset that RAL is in line to receive $500,000 this year to run a ‘‘public transport service’’ ferrying people to the skifield.
With the backing of Ruapehu District Council, it has applied to the New Zealand Transport Agency for the subsidy.
‘‘They’re doing it under the guise of a public transport scheme . . . but clearly it’s skewed to one economic benefactor,’’ said Richard Faire, managing director of My Kiwi Adventure.
RAL began by offering a free service last year, which squeezed other operators out of the market, but this year is charging $6 – still much lower than the $20 traditionally charged by shuttle operators to ferry skiers to Whakapapa and Turoa.
In a business case presented to council, it was stated that the bus service would reduce traffic and congestion on the mountain and, supposedly, lead to a reduction in crashes.
Faire said he was ‘‘really disappointed’’ that the contract was not put out to tender and RAL hadn’t called on the expertise of local operators.
‘‘Could [the crash] have been avoided? I don’t have an answer but I think calling upon the experience of all the operators around here may have thrown up some different solutions for how we do transport up [the mountain].’’
Faire said most operators were using old vehicles because they were unsure of the future viability of their businesses.
‘‘If you don’t have that business confidence then you’re not going to go and buy an electric bus or the most modern bus.
Terry Steven, of Roam Aotearoa, said all operators were using buses ‘‘older than we would like, frankly’’.
This was because newer, second-hand buses had almost exclusively been bought up by companies which did school bus runs, and received subsidies. The Ministry of Education required those buses to be below a certain age.
‘‘You can’t get one that’s 10 years old, there’s no such thing. You either go brand new or for one that falls out of the bottom of the school bus tender round, there’s nothing in between,’’ Steven said.
He said his company had been running Mitsubishi Fusos that were 20 years or older since 2010 and not had any problems.
In the wake of Saturday’s crash it would send all three of its buses in for a re-check, he said,
‘‘We had a big debrief on Sunday and looked at every issue and how we could improve.’’