A landslide smashed into a campsite in rain-swept northern New Zealand on Thursday, leaving multiple people missing under tonnes of mud.
Mounds of earth buried a shower block at the site, which lies at the foot of extinct volcano Mount Maunganui.
Voices were briefly heard calling for help from beneath the rubble, witnesses and emergency officials said.
“Whilst the land’s still moving there, they’re in a rescue mission,” Assistant Police Commissioner Tim Anderson told reporters at the scene.
“I can’t be drawn on numbers. What I can say is that it is single figures.”
Rescuers used heavy machinery to search for survivors after the disaster, which struck after overnight rain lashed the area on New Zealand’s North Island.
A separate landslip ploughed into a home in nearby Tauranga, Anderson said. Two people escaped but two others were still unaccounted for.
At the campsite, the chunk of mountainside hit several camper vans and a pool complex.
Rescuers could be heard cutting into the wrecked shower block.
Visiting Canadian tourist Dion Siluch, 34, said he was relaxing at the now-evacuated Mount Hot Pools complex when it hit.
“I was in a massage at (the) mount pools and the whole room started shaking,” he told AFP.
“When I walked out, there was a caravan in the pool, and there’s a mudslide that missed me by about 30 feet,” Siluch said.
“It was all very confusing. I wasn’t sure if someone had driven off the road and into the pool. It took me a while to realise that the mountain had collapsed and had pushed everything into the pool.”
– ‘People screaming’ –
The tourist said he had seen another landslip about an hour earlier but took little notice.
Police later arrived by helicopter and told people to evacuate, Siluch said.
People at the campsite had instantly tried to dig into the rubble and heard voices, Fire and Emergency commander William Pike told reporters.
“Our initial fire crew arrived and were able to hear the same,” he said.
But rescuers soon withdrew everyone from the site because of the risk of dangerous earth movements, the fire commander said.
Asked if voices had been heard since then, he said: “Not that I know of, no.”
Hiker Mark Tangney saw people fleeing the camp and ran to help, the New Zealand Herald reported.
“I could just hear people screaming, so I just parked up and ran to help,” he told the paper.
“I was one of the first there. There were six or eight other guys there on the roof of the toilet block with tools just trying to take the roof off because we could hear people screaming: ‘Help us, help us, get us out of here’,” Tangney said.
Later, the voices stopped, he said.
