New Zealand Volcano Eruption: Live Updates

Six bodies are recovered. The search for two more continues.

Eight members of New Zealand’s military flew on Friday to White Island, a popular tourist destination, where they recovered the bodies of six victims killed in the Monday eruption of the island’s volcano.

The recovery team returned from the island, also known by its Maori name, Whakaari, without two other victims known to have been killed.

“It’s not over yet,” said Police Commissioner Mike Bush at a news conference. He said a second effort to find the final two bodies had already begun.

“We are this afternoon returning with an aerial search of Whakaari to see if we can identify anyone else on the island and we are also right now deploying our dive team to search the surrounding waters.” he said. We will continue to search for these two people.”

John Tims, deputy police commissioner for National Operations, said the six bodies were airlifted by helicopter back to the recovery team’s vessel, the HMNZS Wellington, moored in the Bay of Plenty, before being flown later to Auckland to be formally identified.

Deputy Commissioner Wally Haumaha that relatives of the dead reacted with relief when they heard the bodies had been secured.

“Like any family would welcome home a loved one, these people have been waiting patiently and just to hear the process was going well, they were ecstatic,” he told reporters.

At least eight additional people were killed in the eruption. Among those who were able to escape, at least 26 remained hospitalized on Thursday with burns over at least 30 percent of their bodies.

The operation to retrieve the remaining victims had been delayed for days because of the volatility of the volcano, which could erupt again at any minute.

“The combined interpretation of all our data is that magma is degassing at shallow depths and the situation remains highly volatile,” said Craig Miller, a volcanologist with GeoNet, the agency that monitors geological activity in New Zealand.

Mike Clement, also a deputy police commissioner for national operations, told reporters earlier Friday as the operation was underway that progress was “taking more time than expected” because of the recovery team’s heavy protective equipment, which was slowing their mobility.

The risk of another eruption is significant, and that was the biggest reason the operation had been delayed since Monday. Volcanologists working with the police and rescue operations have said all week that the possibility of White Island erupting again was about 40 percent to 60 percent. On Thursday, Nico Fournier, a volcanologist in New Zealand, told reporters that White Island, also known by its Maori name, Whakaari, hadn’t been this volatile since 2016.

The rescuers are wearing protective gear to shield them from toxic volcanic gases, as well as the ash underfoot. Mr. Fournier said anyone traversing the island would have difficulty breathing, seeing and walking. On normal tour days, visitors are given hard hats and gas masks when they journey to the island.

Skin needed, lots of it, to help heal the injured.

Health officials found themselves suddenly desperate for one item in particular to help the victims: skin grafts.

Peter Watson, the chief medical officer for the district health service in Auckland, told reporters that while New Zealand has a stock of skin, it urgently needs more — about 1.2 million square centimeters — roughly 1,292 square feet.

“The supplies are coming from the United States and the order has been placed,” he said.

At least 26 of 31 of the victims suffered burns to more than 30 percent of their bodies, doctors said. Some have burns over 90 percent to 95 percent of their bodies. The patients have been sent to burn units in other hospitals around the New Zealand, and several Australian victims have been evacuated to hospitals in Sydney and Melbourne.

A patient with 40 percent burns would require at least eight hours of surgery. As a consequence, all those burn units have been operating, sometimes three to four procedures at a time, since the Monday disaster.

On any given day, just one person admitted to the Whakatane hospital with burns of such severity would have triggered activation of the entire hospital’s trauma team.

“Monday is beyond anything we would have anticipated,” said Dr. Heike Hundemer, clinical leader of Whakatane Hospital. “We used every single bed space, every resource we had to care for those people.”

And because it is the local hospital, many on the staff were working to save people they knew, she said. “Our staff are deeply impacted by what we saw. We are a tight team, in a small community. Some of those people who have lost their lives were known to our staff.”

White Island is an enormous tourist draw in New Zealand, and its volcano is the country’s most active, having appeared in “Lord of the Rings” and other films. Still, how such a calamity was allowed to happen is the biggest question everyone has been asking. The volcano had been exhibiting high levels of activity in recent weeks.

Police and workplace safety officials have started investigations into the deaths of the tourists and at least two employees from a tour operating agency that brought visitors to the island. Questions have persisted over what people knew and when, but Geoff Hopkins, a 50-year-old pastor who was on the island 30 minutes before the volcano erupted, said everyone was well aware of the risks they were taking by walking onto an active volcano.

GeoNet, the geological monitoring agency, had reported increased activity at the volcano for several weeks before the eruption, raising the warning level to 2 out of 5, but maintaining that the island was still safe for visitors.

The tours have been running for decades, under a deal between a handful of operators and the family that has passed down ownership of the land through several generations.

The tours fall under the jurisdiction of the 2016 Health and Safety at Work (Adventure Activities) Regulations, which require a safety audit for companies that “deliberately expose the participant to a serious risk to his or her health and safety that must be managed by the provider of the activity.”

White Island Tours, which was responsible for bringing most or all of the people to the island on Monday, is a registered and approved tour provider. A little over a year ago, it won an award as one of the safest places in New Zealand to work.