The Whakaari/White Island eruption trial has heard for the first time this week from the brothers who owned the volcano, as the court considers health and safety charges against them after the deadly 2019 disaster.
The Whakaari disaster killed 22 people, including 17 Australians after the volcano unexpectedly erupted as tour groups were visiting. Another 25 people were seriously injured.
Andrew, James and Peter Buttle are the directors of Whakaari Management Ltd , the company that owns the island. According to prosecutors, they made around NZ$1m a year from tourism to the island. They have been charged by Worksafe – New Zealand’s health and safety regulator – with failing to adequately ensure the health and safety of workers and other people. They have pleaded not guilty.
The brothers’ company “profited from every single tourist taken to Whakaari”, WorkSafe prosecutor Kristy McDonald KC said as she opened the trial.
The company, she said, “was obliged to understand the risks of what it was doing. It never bothered to understand the risks properly. Nor did it adequately consult as it should have with others who did understand the risk.”
Peter Buttle told the court this week that they were not experts in volcanoes, and the eruption had come as a shock.
“What happened was a shock to everybody. It’s easy to look in hindsight, and I wish we knew and I wish we had the ability to have a bit of foresight, because what happened was a terrible disaster,” Peter Buttle told the court.
“We believe we had put in place everything that we could possible have put in place to ensure the operators operated safely, and we were very confident in the operators we have that they were extremely safety conscious.”
The trial has marked some of the first statements from the Buttle family, who have remained largely silent in the wake of the eruption and throughout the subsequent investigation. Over the past week, their testimony has been presented to Auckland district court in the form of a lengthy audio interview recorded in 2020.
The brothers inherited the island from their father. They told the court they were “not volcanic experts”.
“You never knew from one day to the next essentially what the status of the island was,” Peter Buttle said.
On Friday, the brothers were asked by investigators whether they or their company “believe they owe a duty to the victims of the eruption”.
Peter Buttle responded: “It’s an incredibly hard question to answer, because the scale of it was so horrific and it’s had such a wide impact on … the people who died and survivors and their families,” he said. The impact had been “unimaginable,” he continued, “and to know how to respond to that is just … I don’t know how to put it into words.”
His brother, Andrew, said: “We’re incredibly mindful of the tragedy and its effects. It’s impacted us a lot in that regard”.
Whakaari is one of only a few islands in New Zealand that are privately owned, and has been in the Buttle family for three generations. Peter said that people used to ask his grandfather why he’d bought the island. “He just said ‘Oh, I thought it would be nice to own a volcano’.”
He also recalled visiting the island with his own father, as a child.
“In those days you just walked on to the island and walked up the crater without any real awareness of the risk that you were taking.”
The charges were first laid in 2020, and at the time, WorkSafe chief executive Phil Parkes said they were the result of the most extensive and complex investigation ever undertaken by WorkSafe.
