A New Zealand court on Tuesday found tour company Whakaari Management, owners of the Whakaari Volcano, guilty of violating a safety law for allowing tourists to get too close to the fiery crater when it erupted and killed 22 people during a December 2019 excursion, RNZ reports.
Judge Evangelos Thomas ruled that the company had “failed to install facilities that would sufficiently mitigate the risk, failed to ensure that workers and tourists were supplied with appropriate personal protective equipment, and failed to ensure there was an adequate means of evacuation” before a tour group were engulfed in a sudden phreatic eruption, noting that it should’ve been clear enough after a similar eruption in 2016. Which is fair enough, seeing as the 25 survivors, many of them severely burned, and the families of the dead should absolutely receive damages.
Still, you kind of have to ask why the hell the government didn’t step in and shut them down altogether before this. It’s a goddamned active volcano. Put this up against the OceanGate Titan submersible implosion: That Stockton Rush asshole knowingly bullshitted the passengers into believing the vessel was safe, sturdy, and the risks were minimal. They tragically believed him. It’s hard to see how “Hey! Come check out an active volcano up close!” as a value proposition doesn’t already definitionally carry a non-zero probability that you won’t make it off that island. We’re not trying to blame the victims here, but it’s difficult to see how you can assign nearly the same level of moral culpability to the company as you can for Stockton Rush. The government was aware that the tour operators were taking people to that island and didn’t shut it down.