Rescuer describes horror of New Zealand’s silent eruption
WHAKATANE, New Zealand — The eruption was so silent that Lillani Hopkins didn’t hear it over the hum of the boat’s engines. She didn’t turn around until her dad whacked her.
Then she saw it. Huge clouds of ash and steam shooting into the sky. She was so excited, she grabbed her phone out of her dad’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.
Just under the surface of the crater, pressure had been building for months. Now the superheated water, about 300 Fahrenheit, burst out in a powerful spray. The blast also contained ash, rocks and a few boulders the size of exercise balls, but it was likely the scalding water that was most deadly.
There were 47 tourists on New Zealand’s White Island at the time of Monday’s eruption: 24 from Australia, nine from the U.S., five New Zealanders and others from Germany, Britain, China and
Malaysia. Many had taken a day trip from the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Ovation of the Seas. Authorities believe 16 people were killed, including several who died later in hospitals. Those who survived the blast had terrible burns and some ran into the sea screaming — a screaming that would not stop.
Lillani Hopkins, a 22year-old student who has studied volcanoes, had taken her dad, Geoff Hopkins, a pastor, to the island Monday for a 50th birthday present. Their 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.
After 90 minutes, the group got back on the boat and was just a couple of hundred yards away from the shore when the volcano erupted. The crew told them to get below deck. Then they asked for people with medical training, and Lillani and her dad, who had both trained in first aid, joined two doctors on deck. A dinghy ferried the injured aboard, 23 in all.
Lillani had never seen anything like it. Welts and burns that covered every inch of exposed skin. People’s faces coated in gray paste, their eyes covered so they couldn’t see, their tongues thickened so they couldn’t talk. Some of them still screaming.
Passengers passed Lillani bottles of water. She rinsed out mouths, cleaned eyes and poured as much water on the burns as she could.
The boat appeared to be filled with discarded gray rubber gloves. But they weren’t gloves, they were husks of skin that had peeled away from people’s bodies. Many were burned even under their clothes, and Lillani needed to cut them away.
As she poured water on some people’s burns, it only seemed to make them worse. So other passengers began handing her their clothes to make cold compresses, some of them stripping down to their bras and underpants.
When they finally got back to shore, Lillani says all 23 of those she helped were still breathing. But she hasn’t had any contact with them since and doesn’t know if they all survived.