Six people, including two teenagers, are missing after a landslide ripped through a holiday campsite on the east coast of New Zealand on Thursday morning.
Families were enjoying the summer school holidays at Beachside Holiday Park in Mount Maunganui in Tauranga, when a massive landslide struck after heavy rain had battered parts of the North Island for days.
Mount Maunganui is one of the most important landmarks in the Bay of Plenty region. Hundreds of thousands of tourists visit it every month and it is popular with both international visitors and holidaying New Zealanders.
The landslide-struck campsite sits at the base of Mount Maunganui, also known as Mauao, an extinct volcano that’s a popular tourist destination and a sacred Maori site.
Police on Friday confirmed two teenagers, the youngest being 15 years old, were among those unaccounted for.
Prime minister Christopher Luxon arrived in Tauranga on Friday afternoon and described the scene as an “absolute tragedy”, as he met with the families of those impacted.
“They are grieving incredibly hard, and I know that New Zealand grieves with them. It’s a highly anxious time.
“All we can do is make sure that we’re offering the very best support to those families, and I feel very confident that we are.”
“We have 25 personnel working alongside contractors, using diggers and police dogs, as well as police operations, to ensure that every inch of soil removed is thoroughly examined,” said David Guard, a fire and emergency official.
However, the scale of the disaster and the risks at the site could delay rescue efforts, New Zealand police commissioner, Richard Chambers, told the New Zealand Herald.
“It could be days. We appreciate that everybody is anxious and waiting for their loved ones, and for some answers, but we also have to be very careful,” Mr Chambers said.
Three other foreign tourists who had not checked out and were on a list of campers are also considered unaccounted for.
“We don’t believe they’re here, but we still got to do that inquiry,” police district commander Tim Anderson said.
Mr Anderson said they have not found any signs of life under the rubble, “but we live in hope” and we were still “working 24/7” and “leaving no stone unturned”.
“We have six people that we know are unaccounted for, and we have a further list of three that we’re working through,” he told reporters.
“It’s unlikely that those other three are within the environs of our scene that we’re working with, but we would like the public’s information on that.”
Footage from the campsite showed rescue workers and sniffer dogs working through crushed caravans and flattened tents.
A tourist said he saw the huge landslide coming down and jumped out of the pool, understanding the emergency of the situation, according to broadcaster TVNZ.
Another landslide struck the nearby Welcome Bay, Tauranga, where two people, a grandmother and her grandchild, have died.
One was a Chinese citizen, Chinese Ambassador Wang Xiaolong said on X/Twitter on Friday.
The landslide comes after days of torrential rain linked to a tropical weather system, which has dumped extraordinary volumes of rain across large parts of the North Island.
New Zealand’s emergency management minister, Mark Mitchell, said parts of the east coast resembled “a war zone”, with helicopters deployed to rescue families trapped on rooftops and local states of emergency declared across several regions.
Authorities said the Bay of Plenty region recorded its wettest day on record, with the nearby city of Tauranga receiving about 295mm of rain in just over 30 hours – roughly two and a half months’ worth of rainfall.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand said it had responded to more than 230 weather-related callouts since Tuesday, including rescues from rooftops and flooded homes.
