Mt Maunganui landslide: Inside the ‘haunting’ holiday camp rescue mission

Friday, 23 January 2026

Two people were buried under a residential slip, roads were flooded, and slips were cutting off access across Tauranga as firefighter Karne Gough arrived at a Welcome Bay landslip in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Then the radio crackled again: a second landslide ‒ this one at Mt Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park, with reports of multiple people missing.

“We were redirected just as we arrived,” Gough, the president of the Tauranga branch of the New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union, told The Post in an exclusive interview.

“We already had three crews heading there from the first 111 call, but everything else going on ‒ flooding, road closures ‒ made it incredibly difficult to get in.”

As crews fought their way through blocked roads, the scale of what awaited them at the base of Mauao was still unclear.

“But as soon as we got there we realised how big this incident was,” Gough said. “It’s one of the largest slips I’ve ever seen and, unfortunately, people were involved.”

Two people have now been confirmed dead in Welcome Bay, and six are unaccounted for at the Mt Maunganui site with a further three possibly missing.

What had begun as a storm response was now a multi-fatality disaster.

As Gough pulled into the beachfront campsite, he was met with a chaotic scene.

“There was a lot of panic. Panic trying to identify how many people were actually missing. We had multiple numbers being thrown around when we first arrived. The public were distressed, people in nearby apartments had witnessed the entire thing.”

In those early moments, the first responding crews were told there may still be people alive beneath the dirt.

“There were reports they could hear someone under the rubble. You can understand the stress that puts on the crews.

“And when we started to understand the size of the incident, the potential numbers involved and the potential ages involved, it was humbling.”

Two teenagers are understood to be among the missing.

Gough spent Thursday coordinating operations from a control point inside Fire and Emergency New Zealand’s command unit.

The Mt Maunganui landslide was still considered unstable, he said, with geotechnical experts warning of the risk of further movement, forcing rescuers into the most difficult of positions: slowing down when every instinct tells them to dig faster.

“Naturally, we would love to rush in there and start removing debris as fast as possible. But we can’t do that if it puts our own people at risk.”

Search and rescue teams have been working largely by hand - on their knees, with hand tools - alongside heavy machinery, search dogs and specialist Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) crews. The work is painstaking and exhausting.

“The mental and physical strain is huge,” Gough said. “Managing fatigue is really hard, especially when our teams are also responding to incidents right across the Bay of Plenty, the Coromandel, and beyond.”

At the height of the operation, more than 120 people from multiple agencies were on site - firefighters, police, St John paramedics and intensive care teams, USAR specialists, LandSAR volunteers, council staff and local hapū offering support.

“It was a massive response. And I couldn’t be more proud of everyone involved — our crews, our volunteers, management, police, paramedics, and the public who have been incredibly supportive.”

The danger of landslide rescues has not faded from institutional memory. The deaths of two volunteer firefighters at Muriwai during Cyclone Gabrielle remain a stark reminder of what can go wrong.

Gough said this incident had been approached with an added level of caution — not fear, but awareness.

“For a lot of our people, the instinct to rush in and try to save savable lives is massive. Mentally, that’s been very tough on those first crews.”

Beyond the rescue itself, Gough is already thinking about what comes next - for responders and for the community.

“There were a lot of witnesses. People saw this happen. That means there’s going to need to be a long, drawn-out process of support, not just for our staff but for the public as well.”

For now, he is preparing to return to the scene for another night shift ‒ one more rotation in a disaster that has already left an indelible mark.

“When you realise what’s happened, it really is haunting, but I’ve never been more proud of the way people have leaned in to support each other through something like this.”