Whakaari After 2019: The Volcano Tours Don't Land On Anymore

I’ve stood on the Whakatāne waterfront on a clear afternoon and picked out the pale smudge of Whakaari’s steam plume on the horizon, 48 kilometres out. It looks exactly like what it is: a volcano quietly doing what volcanoes do. On 9 December 2019, it did something else, and 22 people who had been standing on its crater floor a few hours earlier did not come home.

The day itself

Whakaari is New Zealand’s most active volcano, and for decades that was also its selling point. Boat and helicopter operators took visitors — day-trippers from Rotorua, passengers off cruise ships docked at Tauranga — onto the crater floor to look into vents, walk past sulphur-crusted rock, and stand somewhere genuinely alive. On 9 December 2019, 47 people were on the island when it erupted: a short, violent burst of steam, ash and rock with almost no lead time. There was nowhere on that crater floor to get away from it. Twenty-two people died, some immediately and some from their injuries afterwards, and most of the people who survived carry severe burns from that afternoon.

I think about that number every time I read a brochure describing a “close encounter” with a live volcano. Whakaari wasn’t marketed as dangerous. It was marketed as spectacular, which is a different word for the same thing, and the gap between those two words is where the disaster sits.

What the trial found

What followed was, by New Zealand standards, an unusually large legal reckoning. WorkSafe New Zealand — the country’s workplace safety regulator — brought charges under the Health and Safety at Work Act against a string of organisations connected to the island and the tours that ran on it: the company that owned the land, the tour operators who took people there, and government science agencies that monitored the volcano’s activity. It was, in effect, a test of whether a law written for factories and construction sites could be applied to a natural hazard nobody fully controls.

The outcomes were mixed, which tells its own story about how hard that question turned out to be. Some parties were convicted and ordered to pay reparations to the victims and their families. Others — including the scientific monitoring agency — were discharged without conviction, on the reasoning that they had assessed and communicated risk as their role required, and that the decision to keep running tours sat elsewhere in the chain. Nobody walked away from that courtroom feeling like the case had produced a clean, satisfying answer. It produced something closer to a map of where responsibility had actually sat, which turned out to be more diffuse than anyone wanted it to be.

What it changed

The most visible change is the simplest one: nobody lands on Whakaari anymore. Every operator that used to put people on the crater floor stopped, and none has restarted. What’s left is a boat that circles offshore, or a scenic flight that passes over — close enough to see the plume and the scarred crater rim, far enough that a repeat of 2019 would not repeat its death toll. If a Rotorua brochure or a tour listing shows people standing inside a crater with steam behind them, that photo predates December 2019, and it’s worth being suspicious of anything that implies you could still do that.

The less visible change is cultural, and it’s the one I notice more when I’m actually here in Rotorua rather than reading about the coast. Every operator running anything geothermal — a walk near a fumarole, a boat past a boiling lake, a guided route up Tarawera — now talks about risk differently than it did a decade ago. Not because Rotorua’s thermal parks are Whakaari; they aren’t. Wai-O-Tapu and Waimangu are managed, monitored ground with boardwalks and fixed viewing points, nothing like an active crater floor with a live vent nearby.

But the framing shifted anyway: fewer “adventure” verbs, more explicit acknowledgment that this ground is genuinely alive, that conditions get checked before anyone walks on it, and that a guide’s judgment on a given morning can mean a route doesn’t run that day. I hear that caution now from guides on a boat tour through Wai-O-Tapu and Waimangu, in a way I don’t think I would have a decade earlier.

It also made me think harder about Tarawera, which sits much closer to town and has its own buried-disaster history — the 1886 eruption that destroyed the Pink and White Terraces and the village of Te Wairoa. Whakaari and Tarawera are unrelated as volcanoes, but they sit in the same Taupō Volcanic Zone, and walking through the excavated ruins on a Te Wairoa buried village tour now reads differently to me than a straightforward history stop. It’s the same lesson twice, over a century apart, in a place whose Te Arawa history runs long before either eruption: this region’s geology doesn’t ask permission.

None of this means Rotorua’s geothermal tourism is unsafe, or that it should be avoided. Millions of visits happen here without incident, on managed ground with clear paths and trained guides, which is a genuinely different category of exposure than an unsheltered crater floor 48 kilometres out to sea. Even a gentler introduction, like an eco thermal afternoon tour through Rotorua’s geothermal parks, sits on infrastructure built with 2019 in mind, not against it. But I don’t think you can spend time in this part of the country and treat the ground as scenery. Whakaari made that literal for 47 people on one afternoon, and Rotorua, close enough to see its smoke, hasn’t been able to look away from it since.

Whakaari/White Island: what visitors ask

What happened on Whakaari/White Island on 9 December 2019?

The volcano erupted suddenly while several tour groups were on the crater floor. It was a short, violent burst of steam, gas and rock with almost no warning, and there was nowhere on the island to shelter from it.

How many people were on the island, and how many died?

Forty-seven people were on Whakaari that day. Twenty-two died, either at the scene or later from their injuries, and most of the survivors suffered severe burns.

Can visitors still land on Whakaari/White Island?

No. Every operator stopped offering landings after the eruption, and none has resumed them. What remains are boat trips that approach the island from the water and scenic flights that circle it from the air.

What came out of the legal case?

WorkSafe New Zealand prosecuted several organisations connected to the island and the tours under health and safety law. Some were convicted and ordered to pay reparations to victims and families; others were discharged without conviction. It was one of the largest workplace safety prosecutions in the country’s history.

Can you still see Whakaari from Rotorua or the Bay of Plenty?

Yes. It sits about 48 kilometres offshore and its steam plume is often visible from the Whakatāne coastline on a clear day, with or without a boat trip.

Did the eruption change how other geothermal sites near Rotorua operate?

It sharpened how operators talk about risk everywhere in the Taupō Volcanic Zone, including Rotorua’s own thermal parks, even though those sites and Whakaari are not directly comparable in scale or hazard.