How risky is too risky?
The deaths of 21 tourists in the eruption at Whakaari/White Island and a near miss in a Cape Kidnappers landslide have triggered debate about how we measure and manage risk. Nikki Macdonald investigates.
When the cliff started spitting rocks, Anita Van Gastel got her camera out. It was spectacular, and she was ignorant of the danger.
Suddenly, the face collapsed and hurtled towards her. She’d been walking to the Cape Kidnappers’ gannet colony with her friend Pascale. The rocks hit like an explosion.
‘‘It’s like the lights go out. I remember shouting ‘Run’ and the next thing I was sort of rumbling around in the water with a broken leg. So in between, you don’t know anything, it’s black.
‘‘Your head pulls out of the water and then the first thing is you take a deep breath of air. And it was like, whoa, and I called out to Pascale, ‘I’m still alive’. And she called back, ‘Yeah, I’m alive too.’ And then the next thing my leg suddenly popped up, and I called out to her, ‘I broke my foot’. It was still hanging on but, you know, that was really horrific. And then she called back, ‘I broke mine too’.’’
The 7m-high landslide had engulfed the beach, shunting the tourist pair into the water. A walker behind dragged them from the sea. Van Gastel was flown to Hastings, then later to Hutt Hospital, after she almost died again, from gangrene.
That was 1988. Thirty-one years later, she read a news story from her Belgium home. It had happened again, with eerily similar results. In January 2019, two Korean tourists were seriously injured in a landslide just 50m from the site of Van Gastel’s downfall. But this time, the Conservation Department reacted by closing the walk and suspending the concession of Gannet Beach Adventures, the tractor tour company that had plied that route for 68 years, carrying 500,000 passengers without incident. It was too risky, DoC said.
So just how risky is too risky – and who should decide? It’s a question that will inevitably arise in the inquiry into the deaths of 21 people in the December 2019 eruption at Whakaari/White
Island. It’s a question adventure tourism operators consider every day. And it’s a question that has no easy answers.
If anyone might be expected to have strong views on whether the Cape Kidnappers walk should be closed it’s Van Gastel.
Her leg never completely recovered. She was in hospital for 10 weeks. Doctors grafted skin to cover the hole from the multiple compound fractures.
‘‘We were both handicapped for life.’’
But what did recover was her spirit of adventure. She started mountaineering and mountain biking, skiing, scuba diving. She returned to New Zealand for her honeymoon, to spend it climbing the treacherous Copland Pass.
‘‘It’s gonna happen again. You know, everybody knows – we only don’t know when. To close the track would prevent it happening a third time and maybe killing people ... On the other hand, being able to see the gannet colony is such a great experience, it would be a pity that people cannot experience this any longer.’’
If there’s a lower-risk route (one overland tour avoids the beach), tourists should take it, Van Gastel says. But risk is a part of life.
‘‘Active volcanoes with lava in the bottom are exciting to see. We go out to Rotorua and look at the activity – it can explode there as well ... You cannot calculate all these things in, because then you cannot get out of your door any more.’’
How do we measure risk?
The word risk dates from the 17th century, from the Italian word ‘‘risco’’, meaning to dare or run into danger. Psychologists say the term reflected a societal change, from a fatalistic approach accepting flood, fire or disease as unpredictable acts of god, to the idea a person’s decisions could influence the future.
But to decide whether or not to take a risk, you have to understand how big that risk is. In the case of threats from nature, that task usually falls to crown research agency GNS Science.
Risk measurements depend on two things, says Kelvin Berryman, GNS lead scientist on natural hazards. The first is mining history – looking at what has happened, how often, and what the consequences were. In the case of Cape Kidnappers, that means tallying previous landslides and their impact. Then you use science to predict what kind of landslide could kill people, how often that might occur, and what’s the likelihood of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time when that happened. In the case of earthquakes, we’re enough of a shaky isle to have data from thousands of quakes to model the impact of a magnitude 5 quake in any given geology.
But landslides are more difficult. While Berryman says more people have died of landslides than earthquakes in the past 100 years, record-keeping has been patchy.
‘‘Around New Zealand you will see lots of examples of great big rocks at the bottom of cliffs. The trick is trying to date that and know how often that happens. Risk is all about frequency,’’ he says.
Volcanoes are also tricky, as they come in many personalities. Some puff alarmingly for decades then come to nothing. Others can either give advance warning, or blow their top completely unannounced.
After 50 years of search and rescue, Don Bogie knows a bit about risk – and consequence. The former mountaineer – now the Conservation Department principal adviser for visitor risk – pulled Mark Inglis and Phil Doole out of the Aoraki/Mt Cook ice cave they’d been stranded in for two weeks in 1982.
The trouble with New Zealand is that the unique landscape that attracts tourists brings inherent risk, Bogie says.
‘‘We live in a dynamic, geologically young and active country and because of that we have all these neat things – glaciers and volcanoes and fiords. And with that comes extreme weather, extreme rain and wind events, landslides, lahars, avalanches.’’
Bogie draws a 5x5 grid on the whiteboard to explain risk measurement. One axis is for frequency, the other is for severity. He uses the Tongariro Crossing, which traverses an active volcano, as an example.
A graze from a fall on the loose chip at Red Crater might happen monthly, but it’s minor, so that’s considered manageable. At the other end, an eruption with no warning might only happen every 5-40 years, but the consequences are extreme, with potentially mass casualties. Somewhere in between is the line between tolerable and intolerable risk.
The size of the risk also depends on the number of visitors. Bogie admits the Cape Kidnappers walk should never have been promoted as part of the department’s short walks and day hikes, because increasing walker numbers increases the likelihood someone will be in the way when any landslide comes down. That was a fact not lost on DOC staff, who repeatedly warned their bosses of the risk of boosting numbers.
The gold standard of risk measurement is quantitative risk assessment (QRA), a detailed analysis which puts a number on the probability of dying. DOC has just started doing that at popular, problematic sites. But at $100,000-$200,000 each you can’t do that everywhere. Instead, DOC has a qualitative risk register, recording incidents and potential risks at sites nationwide. But what it does with that information depends on who visits the site.
Do we fear the right things?
As the Cape Kidnappers risk assessment points out, ‘‘it is difficult to apply a ‘one tolerable risk criteria’ fits all approach’’. Just as some people like to play the sharemarket while others squirrel funds in the bank, people don’t all have the same approach to risk.
The Conservation Department splits visitors into seven groups, according to their appetite for risk. At one extreme are ‘‘short stop travellers’’, who visit for less than an hour and expect low risk and safe facilities. At the other end are bungee-jumping, parachuting ‘‘thrill seekers’’ and ‘‘remoteness seekers’’, who have a high risk tolerance.
The conundrum is trying to meet everyone’s expectations, Bogie says. That’s made still more difficult when viral social media
posts turn tracks previously visited only by experienced trampers, such as former mountaineer’s access route Gertrude Saddle, into tourist Meccas.
But there’s an added complication, something psychologists call societal risk – society really doesn’t like mass tragedies, even when they’re incredibly rare. More people die annually from drowning than flying, and New Zealand’s treacherous weather claims more lives than its geological hazards. But the dramatic tally of dead when a plane goes down or a volcano erupts provokes more media coverage and political pressure.
Victoria University emeritus professor of psychology John McClure says we tend to overestimate the risk of anything unknown or new that has catastrophic potential.
For example, we remember the victims of the Christchurch earthquake and the Erebus plane crash, but we don’t commemorate the 360 people who died from falls at home last year, McClure says.
‘‘When a whole lot of people die in one event, it’s like setting off a fire alarm in our psychology. It’s good to alert us to those risks, but we tend to overestimate those risks relative to the other, more scattered or gradual sort of risks.
‘‘Our risk perception is a little bit askew,’’ he says. ‘‘What should we be worrying about when we walk out the door? Frankly, we should worry about not walking out the door and getting some exercise.’’
There is a magic number considered the limit of acceptable risk – a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying. That’s a bit higher than the risk of dying when flying 575km by helicopter, according to GNS figures. It dates back to work in the nuclear industry – they estimated the risk of a worker dying was about 1 in 1,000, and decided any public risk should be at least 10 times lower.
It’s the same figure used to red zone houses at risk of being squished by an earthquaketriggered landslide in Christchurch’s Port Hills. While individual homeowners might have been happy to live there even if the risk was 1 in 100, the risk of mass casualties spurred the authorities to override the individual’s right to decide.
‘‘This is the really tricky thing,’’ Bogie says. ‘‘You get into a dilemma between individuals choosing to take high risks and society’s intolerance to mass tragedies.’’
How we manage risk
Hugh Barnard once attended a mountaineering conference where a Swiss climber explained his grandfather’s three rules of risk management for skiing in the Alps: never ski the day after fresh snow; always ski the lower angle slope and in springtime, always be in the restaurant by lunchtime.
It was failproof – in 50 years of guiding, he never saw an avalanche. It also made for dull skiing.
Barnard has been at the forefront of risk management in New Zealand for 30 years, helping develop standards well before the Adventure Activities Regulations were introduced in 2016. He audits adventure tourism businesses, as well as managing Harris Mountain Heliski and running his own summer guiding business.
A former mountaineer who watched his best friend fall to his death, Barnard says the problem with risk is it’s not all bad. Even if you could eliminate risk, you wouldn’t want to. Because would we really hold up Sir Ed as a national hero, if what he’d achieved had not been risky?
In the outdoors, risk brings reward, whether it’s watching the earth steam at Rotorua or Whakaari/White Island, or the challenge of surviving in treacherous terrain.
‘‘Is risk part of the attraction? Yes, it is. People aren’t courting danger, but without the challenge of overcoming elements of real risk, the activity is less rewarding.’’
Heli-skiing, he says is ‘‘nonsensical’’, because there’s a direct relationship between risk and enjoyment. Peak heliskiing is floating down fresh powder on a 45-degree slope, which is also peak avalanche conditions.
So that comes down to management – having guides who understand avalanche risk and can set safe lines for paying customers to follow. And disclosure – most mountaineering guides now send out a risk disclosure document before a trip, get climbers to sign it and then also read it aloud before leaving.
While the responsibility of keeping clients safe weighs on Barnard’s mind every day, he believes people should be able to choose to take a risk, as long as they know what they’re getting into. A mad keen surfer, he chooses to ride in shark zones, because he considers the risk worth the reward.
But is any risk too steep to allow people to accept? The adventure tourism safety audit standard says only that serious risks must be eliminated ‘‘so far as is reasonably practicable’’. Where risk can’t be eliminated, it has to be minimised.
Barnard says the crazy risky sports of speed flying and base jumping might cross that line, as there’s no way to reduce the risk. But even then, someone would be safer doing it guided, than striking out on their own.
That’s the argument used by Gannet Beach Adventures. Colin Lindsay has owned the business for 12 years but has guided trips for 25. He compares it to white water rafting: ‘‘Are you better to buy a raft and put it in a river you know nothing about, and take your family for a ride, or are you better to go with the rafting company that’s been doing it for years?’’
The day of the January 2019 landslide, Lindsay ran a tour of 68 people. They knew there was a heightened risk, as there had been an earlier slip. Lindsay says they decided it was too dodgy to drive the tractor and trailer units through the slip, so they explained the risk and gave punters the option of continuing on foot. About half chose to go on. They stationed spotters at the middle and either end of the slip, to watch for rockfalls, and sent the people through in groups of five.
Lindsay argues Van Gastel and the Korean tourists were lucky not to be killed, because they didn’t understand the risk. But his passengers would be unlucky to be caught in a landslide, because his drivers are constantly watchful. It’s no different to a bus company, except people have been killed in recent bus crashes, he says
‘‘How does a bus company manage the risks? You’ve got 100kmh traffic coming at you, you have proof of maintenance, driver training, and then the rest of it is just hoping nothing goes wrong.
‘‘What we manage to do is remove so many of the risks. We don’t have hills, we don’t have corners, we don’t have oncoming traffic at 100ks. The one risk we have is the occasional rockfall.’’
Lindsay’s year of no trips has cost six driver jobs. He and his wife have found other work to get by. The business is steeped in debt. Far from saving lives, he argues DOC closing his business, while walkers can still access the beach, is endangering lives.
‘‘You can still walk out there; you can still drive out there. But the safest form of transport to get out there is actually shut by DOC. So effectively DOC are doing nothing at the moment for public safety out there. All they’re doing is protecting themselves from the consequences of an incident.’’
Like Barnard, Lindsay argues passengers should be able to accept the risk, as long as they’re warned.
That’s the last option in the risk management toolbox, says Lincoln University associate professor of tourism Stephen Espiner, who wrote his 2001 PhD thesis on risk management at New Zealand’s glaciers.
‘‘There are three things you can do when you’re faced with risk – you can remove it; you can limit access; and you can warn.’’
In a case like Whakaari/White Island you can’t remove the risk altogether, and they had already limited access, so discussion is likely to come down to the adequacy of the warning.
The problem with warnings and risk waivers is people don’t really understand risk, Espiner says. He found even where signs warned of rock and icefall, visitors reckoned if the track was open, it must be safe.
Espiner calls for better calculation of risks, and a standardised ‘‘language of risk’’, comparing an activity to threats the public understand, such as the risk of dying in a car crash.
Even then, there still need to be different rules for different places, depending on the risk tolerance of those who go there, with remote areas remaining untouched by intrusive signs or barriers, he says.
‘‘We desperately need landscapes and settings which have very few controls.’’
To Bogie’s concern, recent Conservation Department surveys found visitors still think if something is popular or open, it must be safe. ‘‘There’s no such thing as a totally safe outdoor experience.’’
He says people – including his own staff – are shocked when he tells them it’s not DOC’s job to keep visitors safe.
It is their job to estimate risks, decide whether they’re acceptable to the kinds of people who go there and – if not – to reduce them. For example, at Franz Josef glacier, they have moved the viewpoint out of the worst rockfall zone. Warning is also an option – at Mintaro Hut on the Milford Track, they tell walkers the hut could be taken out by an earthquaketriggered rockfall ‘‘so you can make your own decision on whether to proceed’’.
DOC is working with GNS to decide how risky is too risky for each of its visitor categories. But it needs the public’s help. ‘‘It’s really about what society thinks, not what DOC thinks,’’ Bogie says.
White Island Tours did not respond to an interview request about whether tours to the island should resume. Mark Law, from Kahu helicopters, did. Law’s company took trips to Whakaari/White Island, and he flew in after the eruption to rescue the injured.
Risk is manageable and should be a part of everyday life, he says. Instead, people are suffocating under a man-made mountain of fear. While there’s an obligation to make sure people understand the risk of visiting an active volcano, it then comes down to individual responsibility.
‘‘The human has an incredible desire to experience things outside of everyday life. This for the most part enriches the spirit, provides real experiences and gets things done. Risk-based decisions and actions are one part of life’s ingredients. Without these you are no one.’’