Tangiwai, 1953 - Police Response to Disaster

• Police Response to Disaster
• Tangiwai, 1953
• Wahine, 1968
• Erebus, 1979
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New Zealand's worst rail disaster

The explanation of the difficulty in recovering bodies is that a wall of water about 20 feet high swept down the river. Enormous quantities of silt and rock have been swept down and it is feared that many bodies have thus been buried. Farmers and others with property on the banks of this river as far as the sea, are asked to keep a close watch and to send reports to the nearest police station.

Prime Minister Sidney Holland, Xmas Day, 1953

In the late evening of Christmas Eve 1953 the Wellington-Auckland passenger express was crossing the volcanic plateau near Waiouru. Moments before the train arrived, part of the bridge over the Whangaehu River at Tangiwai was swept away by a huge lahar of water, mud and boulders released from the crater lake on Mt Ruapehu. This is a recurrent natural event on the mountain and it later emerged that a bridge pier had been fatally weakened by a previous lahar in 1925. The engine and the front five carriages (with the sixth following shortly after) plunged into the torrent with the loss of 151 lives.

Rescue situation

The flood subsided quickly but the initial rescue had to be carried out in darkness. The 22-year old police constable at Waiouru, Leo Smidt, was one of the first on the scene. He had gone to investigate the unexplained roaring noise coming from the direction of the forestry plantations and reached the scene within a few minutes. He had to direct the rescue for the first hour or so until more senior staff arrived from Taihape.

At this time there was no national rescue organisation and arrangements were improvised on the spot. The presence of the army camp at nearby Waiouru meant that there was plentiful labour, transport and shelter to assist the police and civilian volunteers who rushed in from as far away as Wanganui. Over the next few days bodies, stripped and mangled by the flood, were recovered from up to 60km downstream. This proved to be an important experience in co-ordinating volunteer search and rescue efforts.

Another young constable, George Twentyman, took charge of the enormous volume of clerical work of recording bodies and property to ensure they were kept together. His experience was transferred to the Wahine event 15 years later when he took command of the rescue operation.

Victim identification

Disaster victim identification is a major task following any mass tragedy. In 1953 some of the deceased were recent arrivals in New Zealand without relatives or local medical and dental records to help identify them. Blazing summer heat and lack of refrigerated facilities meant that the initial identification had to be carried out as quickly as possible and was not accurate in every case. A makeshift mortuary was set up at the army camp where police, including two women constables, cleaned and laid out the bodies in coffins. Coroner's courts were hastily convened at Waiouru to legally determine identity where possible and issue death certificates.

Helping relatives

Experience was also gained in handling the large number of relatives who arrived. After a few days the inspector in charge, W. J. K. Brown, had to make the difficult decision to hold a mass identification to speed up the process. He arranged for clergy to be on hand to give support, prepared the relatives for what to expect, then invited them to file past the partly opened coffins. This went as well as could be hoped and the remaining unclaimed bodies were then transferred to hospital mortuaries in Wellington and Wanganui.

The process of identification falls into the area of pathology rather than police work but the police were involved in a gruesome later phase. By April information obtained from overseas confirmed that several of the 76 bodies interred in a mass grave in Karori cemetery had been misidentified. An order was obtained to exhume the grave, a task which fell to luckless police recruits. All but seven bodies were securely identified and the pathologists at least learned a great deal more about identification technique.

Police gave evidence to a public inquiry; no legal blame was attached to any party, and there were no prosecutions.

Next page: Wahine, 1968