White Island survivor remembers ‘I SANG TO B OUT THE PAIN'
Three years on, Lillani Hopkins feels incredibly lucky to be alive after her trip of a lifetime turned into disaster
Throughout her geology studies, Lillani Hopkins often joked about how lucky it would be to see a volcano erupt.
But after she and her father Geoff witnessed the lethal eruption of Whakaari/White Island in 2019 – and tended to some of the most critically burned – the 24-year-old concedes now it’s something “no one should ever see”.
Three years on and reflecting how the tragedy has changed her life, Lillani continues to come to terms with what has happened by educating others. After the disaster, she decided to qualify as a teacher and educate kids about volcanoes.
“Sometimes I will go a day without thinking about it,” the intermediate school teacher tells Woman’s Day. “Some days I think about it all the time because of little triggers.”
“Our class’ enquiry topic at the moment is volcanoes, so I briefly shared with students a little bit about what I went through. Some of them already knew – those who like to google their teacher! – but a lot didn’t and some kids cried.
“They wanted to know why I would go and help. And their main concern was, ‘Did people get stuck in the lava?’ So I had to explain there were different types of eruptions.”
Palmerston North-born Lillani had lived in England most of her life until her family moved back to New Zealand in 2016. Visiting White Island had always been the dream for the self-confessed “volcano nerd”.
“My dad came over from the UK for a year when he was 25, met my mum here and toured White Island. He often talked about it and it was something I really wanted to do with him.”
So Lillani bought Geoff, a Hamilton pastor, a ticket for his birthday. Mum Lyn, 60, was unable to join them after hurting her back.
Lillani describes arriving at the island that sunny December day as being like a scene from a movie. “It was surreal. I was so excited and in awe!” she recalls.
When they began their tour, the group’s two guides told them to wear hard hats. They were also given gas masks (which Lillani found she needed to wear peering into the crater) and hard-boiled lollies to suck, to reduce the taste of sulphur.
As they walked around the island, the then-university student was full of enthusiasm and questions, even asking her guide, “What do we do if it erupts?”
“Strap on your mask and take shelter,” the guide answered, before mentioning there was a shipping container somewhere on the island that had supplies in it. After completing the tour, Lillani was the last one back on the boat for the hour-long trip back to Whakata¯ne.
“We were just pulling away from the bay and I remember staring into the distance at the mainland, trying to avoid sea sickness, when I heard loads of people moving behind me.
“Then Dad nudged me and I turned to see huge clouds of ash and steam shooting into the sky,” tells Lillani, who initially grabbed her phone to film it.
“As soon as our crew saw, we went full-speed away and they
‘The shock fully set in and I burst into tears when I saw Mum’
told everyone to get inside to avoid the ash. Thirty seconds later, the entire island was engulfed in a huge ash cloud.”
Shortly after the catastrophic eruption, their tour guides turned the boat around, heading back into the clouds of volcanic ash, in a bid to search for survivors. When asked if anyone on board had first-aid training, Geoff, 52, and Lillani jumped up to assist alongside other passengers who were doctors.
“I was handed a first-aid kit and walked around the back of the boat,” she says. “The first lot of people we picked up were already on the shore, so when it erupted, they’d jumped in the water. They weren’t burnt – they just had ash in their hair and we gave them eye washes. It was when they brought the next load of people who had been on the island that we saw the severity of what had happened.”