An activity or an adventure ...

Aphotograph of a helicopter with mangled rotors, covered in grey ash, will become a lasting image of the horrific tragedy on Whakaari/White Island. It was flown to the island by pilot Brian Depauw, from Rotorua-based company Volcanic Air. Media reports say he had four German tourists on board. When the volcano erupted on Monday, Depauw and his passengers managed to get off the island, but the destroyed helicopter remained behind.

Ten more tourists were rescued by Volcanic Air director Tim Barrow, co-pilot Graeme Hopcroft and Whakata¯ ne-based pilot Mark Law, in an astonishing act of heroism under terrifying conditions.

Much has been said since Monday about the value of Whakaari/White Island to the Bay of Plenty’s tourist economy. The Volcanic Air website offers walking and landing tours, at $1095 for adults and $821 for children. As recently as Thursday, tourist reviews were still displayed on the website. One wrote: ‘‘You walk to the top and look down into a steaming volcanic lake. Love it!’’

Stuff’s reporting has found while three helicopter companies, including Volcanic Air, regularly took tourists to the island, none were registered with workplace health and safety regulator WorkSafe. The sole registered Whakaari/White Island operator is White Island Tours, which runs boat trips.

Volcanic Air and WorkSafe appear to have had a two- or three-year-long exchange of views over whether the company should or should not be registered. According to WorkSafe, Volcanic Air did not think its activity fitted the adventure category. WorkSafe said adventure activities are those with ‘‘a reasonably high level of inherent risk’’, including deliberate exposure to dangerous terrain. Walking on an active volcano would seem to fit the bill.

By contrast, Volcanic Air argues that information from WorkSafe has been contradictory. This is not to suggest that Volcanic Air and other operators have been reckless or have in any way endangered tourists. It could be argued that the brave actions of the pilots showed their skill and how seriously they regarded safety.

But the long-running disagreement between WorkSafe and the company does suggest a general looseness or vagueness in the management of adventure tourism in New Zealand that clearly needs to be tidied up.

Our adventure tourism industry comes out of a perception of ourselves as people more at home in the great outdoors than cities, happy to take risks and perhaps to improvise solutions with Number 8 wire. It is a flattering self-image that has generated a lucrative industry that may be threatened by this week’s tragedy.

Writing in Wired magazine in 2012, US vulcanologist Erik Klemetti said he decided against visiting Whakaari/White Island and he observed that we are generally much more permissive than the US.

When he visited the Waimangu Geothermal Valley in Rotorua, for example, he was ‘‘taken by how close they allow people to come to active hydrothermal features, with boiling, acidic waters and active steam vents’’, compared to the more careful management of tourists at Yellowstone National Park.

Klemetti could see the dangers that others could not. While Whakaari/White Island tourists were given gas masks and helmets, ‘‘if even a small phreatic (steam-driven) explosion were to happen when a group was in the crater, the consequences could be catastrophic’’, he warned. He followed with a note that now seems inevitable and prophetic, asking, ‘‘Will it take a half dozen deaths at White Island to change the culture, or is that merely the cost of being adventurous? It is hard to say.’’