About 100 hikers are being rescued by helicopter after becoming stranded overnight on popular bush tracks in New Zealand’s South Island when a month’s rainfall in a single day washed out roads and bridges and caused flooding and landslides.
Eight helicopters and waiting buses ferried the hikers stuck in shelters in Fiordland – and about 70 drivers trapped on the Milford Road – to safety in the town of Te Anau. Two of the hikers were injured when the hut they were sheltering in was hit by a landslide.
Officials on Tuesday began checking among those rescued to confirm that everyone on the trails had been accounted for.
Nearly 400 others – including 195 tourists – are trapped in the nearby township of Milford Sound and will have to wait until at least Wednesday to be rescued after flooding cut off the highway in and out of the town.
The weather chaos in the picturesque Fiordland area of Southland – at the bottom of the South Island – hit during the peak summer tourist season and generated a state of emergency for the region.
“We’ve got quite widespread flooding across the whole region,” said Angus McKay, the group controller for Emergency Management Southland. “It’s exceptional even for a very wet place.”
Fiordland is deluged by about 10 metres of rain a year – and 1.1 metres had fallen in the past three days alone.
The tourists stuck in Milford Sound were safest there, McKay said, because so many highways were closed. “There’s plenty of accommodation, plenty of food,” he said. “Until we can get them out safely there’s no rush with that.”
The road the township is located on – State Highway 94 – will be closed at least until the weekend and potentially into next week, said New Zealand’s transport agency in a statement.
Those who had been rescued by helicopter included travellers stuck on the closed Milford Road, and 31 people who had been spending the night in a Department of Conservation hut for hikers when it was hit by a landslide in the early hours of Tuesday.
“It’s a bit of a shock, but everyone seems to have done the right thing,” McKay said.
The weather woes came two months after tourists were trapped in Franz Josef, an alpine town further up the South Island, when floods washed out roads there too. At the time, local business owners complained that infrastructure servicing the town, part of a popular tourist region, had not been sufficiently maintained.
Tourism operators would struggle with the latest events, said Caroline Orchiston from the Centre for Sustainability at the University of Otago.
“The fact this event is taking place alongside the coronavirus outbreak is especially challenging, given many tourism operators are already experiencing cancellations and business disruption,” she said.
