Student describes helping burned tourists of volcanic island
A RESCUER has described the harrowing time she spent helping those badly burned after this week’s deadly volcanic eruption in New Zealand.
Lillani Hopkins, a 22-year-old student who has studied volcanoes, had taken her father Geoff to White Island for a 50th birthday present on Monday.
Describing the moment the volcano erupted, Ms Hopkins said the eruption was so silent she did not hear it over the hum of the boat’s engines.
She did not turn around until her father whacked her, and then she saw it – huge clouds of ash and steam shooting into the sky.
Ms Hopkins was so excited that she grabbed her phone out of her father’s bag and hit record.
But then the plume stopped going up and started rolling out over the cliffs – and her awe turned to fear.
There were 47 tourists on New Zealand’s White Island at the time of Monday’s eruption.,
Authorities believe 14 people were killed.
Ms Hopkins said that when she began her tour, the group’s two guides told them to wear hard hats.
They gave them gas masks, which the guides said they could wear if they had trouble with their breathing.
When the volcano erupted, Ms Hopkins said she had never seen anything like it.
She described welts and burns that covered every inch of exposed skin, people’s faces coated in grey paste, their eyes covered so they could not see, their tongues thickened so they could not talk.
Passengers passed Ms Hopkins bottles of water and she rinsed out mouths, cleaned eyes and poured as much on the burns as she could.
Many were burned even under their clothes, and Ms Hopkins needed to cut them away.
Ms Hopkins talked to the injured, asking them questions about their holidays, trying to distract them and keep them conscious.
An elderly couple from Australia had become separated, with the wife unable to move, so Ms Hopkins found the husband and led him by the hand back to her.
He sat down and held her in his arms.
Thirty-nine people were taken from the island that day on Ms Hopkins’s boat and in helicopters.
Five were already dead or died soon after. A sixth person who was being treated for burns died on Tuesday night.