Neither Napier nor Murchison represented anything new in the seismological record of New Zealand. The country's earthquake proneness was familiar to the earliest settlers, many of whom were terrified by tremors in 1840, the foundation year of the Wellington settlement. Since then the record of the middle districts of the country—the south of the North Island and the north of the South Island-has been an unenviable one. In 1848 many colonists turned their backs permanently on Wellington when the new settlement was more than half destroyed, and those who stayed suffered again in 1855 when a disastrous earthquake rocked both sides of Cook Strait, causing a dozen deaths, Maori and Pakeha. The shocks caused heavy loss and great discouragement in many pioneer localities still struggling to establish them selves. At regular intervals in later years, 1868, 1890, 1897, 1904, 1913, and 1914, major earthquake disturbances were experienced over a wide territory stretching from Wanganui in the north to Banks Peninsula in the south.

Then, in June 1942, Wellington, the Hutt Valley, North and South Wairarapa, and the Manawatu bore the brunt of another series of violent earthquakes which destroyed hundreds and damaged thousands of houses and large public and private buildings. The devastation was widespread, but with the experts still trying to assess losses and estimate the extent of necessary demolitions, another series began. On 1 and 2 August in the same year, the greater part of the southern end of the North Island experienced the impact of further major shakes which added noticeably to the desolation still unrepaired. Wellington, Carterton, Masterton, Eketahuna, Pahiatua, and Palmerston North all suffered structural losses in greater or less degree. In the Wairarapa the cost was estimated at £500,000, and it was officially stated that the damage in the whole area as a result of the two disasters-in June and August—was in excess of £2,000,000. Fortunately, the loss of life in each case was small, the total not exceeding half a dozen persons.

by Ronald Jones, Journalist and Script Writer, New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, Wellington.

Catastrophes are of the order of events often loosely labelled. Comparatively few deserve the distinction, but in New Zealand it will be generally accepted that the Hawke's Bay earthquake merits isolation as the Dominion's greatest disaster. Napier and Hastings in ruins, and half-a-dozen lesser provincial centres shattered in February 1931, represent the worst tragedy in the history of the Dominion. From the debris of earthquake and fire, the bodies of 256 dead were recovered, and no precise inventory has ever been made of the injuries suffered or the material resources lost. At the time, the earthquake was estimated to have cost £5,000,000 in Napier and nearly £2,000,000 in Hastings.

It was at 10.47 a.m. on 3 February 1931 that the first shock struck Hawke's Bay. Milne's Earthquakes (1939 edition, by A. W. Lee, a standard world text on such matters) described and illustrated the occurrence at length, and Dr Charles Davison, a recognised British authority, included the Hawke's Bay upheaval in his selection of the world's 18 worst earthquakes in the last 200 years. It would be idle to attempt in short compass a detailed description of the destruction of Hawke's Bay's two main centres. In Napier, familiar landmarks completely disappeared. Bluff Hill, a substantial suburban promontory, crumbled and all but disintegrated; Ahuriri Lagoon, a wide stretch of water, was upthrust to the extent of producing 9,000 acres of dry land; and some of the city's largest structures—the Nurses' Home, a Home for the Aged, the Technical College, the Public Library, the Cathedral, and countless warehouses, office blocks, and dwellings—collapsed with heavy loss of life. And what the quake did not destroy a great fire did its best to consume. With the city's fire-fighting facilities in ruins, Napier was ablaze within a few minutes of the earthquake, the flames sweeping through 10 acres of buildings. And in all this 161 people died. In Hastings the story was much the same. Traders, shoppers, and workers died where they stood as the town toppled. And in the evening, after a second violent shock at dusk, fire added to the general chaos. In one large department store customers and staff perished together, and in a leading hotel trapped men died in the second wave of tremors while rescuers toiled to release them. A total of 93 lost their lives in Hastings.

The earthquake's trail of destruction stretched over 300 miles from Wairoa (where two deaths occurred) to Dannevirke and north Wairarapa. North of Napier great stretches of coastline slipped into the sea and, throughout the whole provincial district, roads, railways, bridges, communications, and public services were either destroyed or disrupted. Hillsides disappeared, rivers were blocked or changed their courses, and huge cracks and fissures opened all over the countryside. The stricken population, up to 30,000 in the centres, were deprived of every elementary necessity of life—food, water, light, telephones, and transport. And to complete the devastation and add to the terror, the earth continued to quiver and shake for 10 days, some of the succeeding shocks equalling the intensity of the first disastrous upheaval. The story of courage, unselfishness, and self-sacrifice displayed in those days in the shattered areas is an inspiring one, but nothing became Hawke's Bay more in its adversity than the completeness and expedition of the rehabilitation it achieved with nationwide assistance under the two commissioners appointed to direct the huge task of reconstruction.

Some of New Zealand's worst earthquakes are matters of recent history. In 1929, about mid-morning on 17 June, both Islands, almost from Auckland to the Bluff, were rocked in greater or less degree by earthquake shocks which struck with devastating force in the upper districts of the South Island from Nelson in the north to Westport and Greymouth in the west. The epicentre of the disturbances was in one of the recognised great fault lines of the South Island in the vicinity of the Lyell Range, a few miles west of Murchison, a small rural township with a population of about 300. In all 17 lives were lost, 10 of those killed being in the Murchison area which was shattered to the extent of being rendered virtually uninhabitable. So severe were the shocks in this region that, if they had occurred in any of the populous localities of the Dominion, the death roll must have been appalling. For many miles around, the countryside was changed from a typical New Zealand pastoral region into a shambles of fissures, landslides, floods, and destroyed roads, bridges, and buildings. Nelson, the nearest city, with a population in excess of 20,000, suffered heavy structural damage, but fortunately was removed from the worst effects of the continuing shocks. Westport and Greymouth, busy centres of the coal industry and thickly populated, were also shaken to their foundations with heavy loss. But it was in the predominantly rural districts in between that the full force of the tremors was felt. Roads, railways, and communication services were either destroyed or so seriously disrupted that the task of evacuation from the stricken areas was dangerous as well as difficult. It was not only man's handiwork that suffered. Mountains, hills, rivers, and lakes were affected by destructive earth movements, and even today, more than 30 years afterwards, tell-tale scars are plainly visible in many spots where subsidence or upthrust has completely altered the topography of the district. The Murchison earthquake was no terror of a day or two. For up to a fortnight, frequently to an accompaniment of rain, thunderstorms, floods, and bitter cold, the tremors followed one after the other.

Unfortunately the first three months of 1965 have to date (April 1965) been the worst on record for air accidents. These included a number of topdressing crashes as well as the loss of a Cessna 180 which on 4 March crashed on Lake Shirley near the head of Caswell Sound, Fiordland, with the death of the pilot and one passenger, followed on 12 March by the crash of another Cessna 180 on the north-east face of Mt. Talbot, Fiordland, with four deaths.

by Ronald Jones, Journalist and Script Writer, New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, Wellington.

On 3 July 1963 a National Airways Dakota DC3 went missing in a storm which it encountered while flying on the first leg of a routine passenger trip from Auckland, via Tauranga, Gisborne, and Palmerston North, to Wellington. It was thought that the crash had occurred in the Kaimai Ranges in the vicinity of the small settlement of Gordon, but deteriorating weather conditions prevented rescue operations. At 11.30 a.m. on 4 July one of the ground parties saw wreckage on a 2,400 ft bush-covered ridge of Mount Ngatamahinerua (2,787 ft). This information was quickly checked by helicopter and a ground party at once set out from Gordon. They found the plane completely burned out and the 22 passengers and three crew members dead. This is the worst air accident in the history of civil or military aviation in New Zealand. The remains of the aircraft were covered over by an Army party on 2 May 1964.

At 9.52 a.m. on 12 February 1962, a 26-year-old “Dragonfly” aircraft belonging to Air Charter (New Zealand) Ltd. left Christchurch for a scenic flight over the Milford Sound—Fiordland area, where weather conditions were uncertain. Besides the pilot the aircraft was carrying four passengers, including a young newly married couple. No trace of the plane or its occupants has ever been found. During the search 34 planes flew nearly 400 hours in 167 sorties and covered an area of 17,000 sq. miles.

Although no cause for the disappearance could be established, the official inquiry drew attention to shortcomings in the plane's maintenance and, also, to its being overloaded.

Mount Ruapehu claimed another 10 lives in the years that followed. On 4 December 1951 a Royal New Zealand Air Force plane flying from Ohakea base to Rukuhia in the Waikato struck the western slopes of the mountain in murky weather and all four occupants of the machine were killed.

There was a more poignant angle to the 1961 tragedy on Mt. Ruapehu. Six people died when a Bay of Plenty Airways Aero-Commander passenger plane crashed into the eastern side of the snowcovered mountain on 21 November 1961. The plane carried a pilot and five passengers. Among them were a young wife and her two infant children who were returning to Murupara after a reunion weekend with a Lower Hutt family with whom they had travelled from England as emigrants only months before. The other two passenger casualties were adults, and the pilot, who also lost his life, was the founder and managing director of the airline. The Civil Aviation expert who inspected the wreck found that the crash appeared to have been caused by sudden turbulence over the mountain. This aggravated a fatigue crack that had developed in a wing spar. The crack progressed into an immediate fracture which so weakened the wing that it sheared off from the fuselage. The plane struck the mountainside at 7,500 ft, bringing Mt. Ruapehu's toll in aircraft crashes to 21 in 14 years.

The first major passenger-plane crash with fatal results in the then nearly 20 years of commercial flying in New Zealand occurred on 23 October 1948, when the Lockheed Electra airliner Kaka, operated by the State-owned National Airways Corporation, went missing on a routine flight from Palmerston North to Hamilton. Less than half an hour after take-off, the Kaka literally disappeared from sight and sound, and it was nearly seven days, after an intensive air and land search over 450 square miles of rugged country, before the wrecked fuselage was discovered half-buried in the snow 3,000 ft up on the slopes of Mt. Ruapehu. All 13 occupants of the plane had perished. In the disintegrated debris of the machine was found the air-speed indicator which, jammed at a reading of 150 m.p.h., furnished some evidence of the terrific force of the impact when the plane struck the mountainside. A Court of Inquiry found that the Kaka was off course at the time of accident, due to an error in the pilot's calculations.

In the following year, on 18 March 1949, another National Airways passenger liner, the Kereru, a Lodestar aircraft with 15 persons on board, smashed into the Tararua foothills near Waikanae, at an altitude of 1,500 ft, and burst into flames on impact. There were no survivors. The Kereru was on a trunk flight from Auckland to Dunedin and crashed into the hillside a few minutes after receiving its landing instructions from the control tower at the Paraparaumu airport, 13 miles away. At the time of the accident the pilot was flying under visual flight rules, for which he had authority, due to a very low cloud base. Wreckage was sighted two hours after the Kereru had been posted overdue, but this turned out to be the remains of an Air Force Ventura lost three years before on a training flight. Shortly afterwards, however, searching aircraft sighted burning debris on the wooded hillside east of Waikanae, and not far from the Otaki River mouth. This was the remains of the Kereru, and when a rescue party reached the scene after a hazardous trek through the bush, they found parts of the burnt-out plane spread over a wide area. In the view of the Royal Commission of Inquiry the tragedy was the result of faulty navigation.

Air losses in New Zealand have followed the general pattern of those of most countries in the apprentice days of aviation, but major disasters on regular passenger-service routes have been mercifully few in the three to four decades since the establishment of this form of inland communication. Only three large airliners have been lost, but in each case the casualty rate was 100 per cent. Smaller craft have a less enviable record and the fate of some is still unknown. There is the case of Moncrieff and Hood, whose aeroplane, heard over the North Island at the end of a pioneering flight across the Tasman Sea in January 1928, has never been discovered. Then also, aerial topdressing, a recent New Zealand development for the improvement of pastoral high country, is unfortunately accompanied by a loss of life and machines.

Wartime air accidents, especially those concerned with training, were not infrequent, but at the time, from considerations of security, there was little public knowledge of some distressing occurrences. For instance, on 9 June 1942, the explosive crash of an American Flying Fortress, shortly after taking off from Whenuapai at midnight, awoke half the sleeping population of suburban Auckland, but it was over a year before an official announcement was made to the effect that that night 11 visiting airmen had lost their lives. Similarly, when a Liberator bomber a year later came to grief on the fringe of the same airfield, the public were not told until many months later that 14 out of a total complement of 16 airmen had been killed. On 21 August 1944 two of a flight of seven Lockheed Hudson bombers of the reconnaissance section of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, with 14 men on board, were lost off the coast of New Zealand on a service flight from Fiji to Auckland. They disappeared when they protectively broke formation in thick weather and were never seen again.

The first civilian casualty list associated with regular passenger air services occurred on 7 May 1942 when a Wellington-Nelson aircraft with a crew of two and three passengers struck a rock face 5,000 ft up on Mt. Richmond in the Nelson district in murky weather. The plane was found burnt out. There were no survivors. And then later in the same year, on 21 December 1942, an Air Travel Ltd. De Havilland Dragonfly, bound for Nelson from Westport, plunged into the sea. The pilot was rescued by a passing collier, but the four passengers were drowned.

These are a group of microscopic planktonic plants, some of which are delicate and difficult to examine and preserve, but the armoured forms are protected by cellulose cases, often of a bizarre shape with curved projections like horns. Usually the cells are solitary, but occasionally chains similar to those of the diatoms are found. One species of dinoflagellate, Gymnodinium, is reddish in colour and extremely poisonous to other living organisms. The presence of enormous numbers of this species is responsible for the “red tides” in the Gulf of Mexico and other parts of the world where they cause enormous mortality of fish. Fortunately this does not occur in New Zealand. The red waters sometimes seen in Wellington harbour are formed by a small protozoan which, so far as we know, is harmless.

by Richard Morrison Cassie, M.SC.(N.Z.), D.SC.(AUCK.), Senior Lecturer in Zoology, University of Auckland.