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Over The Horizon

Lessons From Rabaul

A New Zealand civil defence team is visiting Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, to learn from last year's huge volcanic eruption and subsequent experiences. Last year, on September 19, the two volcanoes at Rabaul erupted violently, following a series of earthquakes which occurred around Rabaul Harbour just 19 hours before the eruption began. During the crisis, 30,000 people were evacuated from Rabaul. The town was blanketed in ash, but very few people were killed.

Now that the crisis is over, the New Zealand team will identify volcanic contingency plans and responses that could be applied in New Zealand. The mission will see how the country coped with the eruptions and evacuation of the city, and how the scientists at Rabaul Volcano Observatory coped with the eruption and crisis. Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences geologists, Ian Nairn and Brad Scott, have both worked in Rabaul before.

New Zealand first became involved with the Rabaul volcano observatory in 1979, when two volcanologists were killed by the eruption of Karkar volcano, an island volcano about 700 kilometres from Rabaul. The PNG government asked for assistance with the Rabaul Volcano Observatory, and Scott went over to work in the observatory. Rabaul itself became very seismically active in 1982, activity peaking in 1984 with 12,000 earthquakes a month and the ground rising by one centimetre each week. Again the PNG government asked New Zealand for help. Rabaul did not erupt at that time but another volcano, Manam, was erupting and Scott evaluated that eruption.

In 1989, New Zealand geologists mapped potential volcanic hazards. After the strong activity in the early 1980s, the volcano quietened down, but then without much warning, in September last year, there was a magnitude 5 earthquake, and within 19 hours Rabaul had erupted.

The current visit is aiming to answer such questions as why did this event happen so suddenly. The whole team will examine issues of national disaster and emergency services management, studying how the Rabaul Volcano Observatory coped before and during the disaster, what indications they had of the eruption, and how to run a volcano observatory in a crisis.

The value of this visit for New Zealand is that Rabaul is one of the few volcanoes active in recent years that is comparable in size to the active caldera volcanoes of the Central North Island -- such as Taupo and Okataina -- and which shows evidence of young eruptions of a size and destructive potential equivalent to our volcanoes. The Rabaul eruption offers an opportunity to compare the protocols adopted in the National Civil Defence Plan (1994) with a real-life situation and to evaluate where problems would have arisen had an eruption of this timing and magnitude occurred in New Zealand.