The Cave Creek Platform Disaster of 1995 | Episode 95 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The most unusual thing about today's episode is that almost
everyone is going to bruise their loves, and for your sake,
I hope it's from laughing, because not everyone is going
to be so lucky. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories

(00:34):
Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some
of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely
unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and
around the world. On today's episode, you'll hear about the
one part of your body I want you to consider
more worthy of fiddling with than your genitals. If you

(00:56):
are a stickler for building codes, we are going to
take you on a beautiful, potentially one way hike to
see some shoddy ass workmanship, and we'll see what makes
helicopter rescues as frightening as whatever it was you did
to earn one in the first place. And if you
were listening on Patreon, I would use tales of sharks

(01:17):
and octopuses and meth and sex toys to try to
make today's location more appealing. You would beat inductees into
the no Parachute Hall of Fame, and you would find
out how the greatest construction disaster in American history inspired
my idea for an Osha violation Wiji board game. This
is not the show you play around kids, or while eating,

(01:40):
or even in mixed company. But as long as you
find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something
that could potentially save your life, our work is done.
So with all that said, shoot the kids out of
the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and
let's begin. Inside. Each of us lurks a quiet longing

(02:07):
to be close to nature, not just to feel the
sun against our skin, but to smell the trees and
the plants, to feel a breeze caressing your face, and
to hear the crack of twigs and greenery beneath our feet.
Whether walking through the woods or sitting beside a lake,
being amongst nature reminds us that we belong to something
bigger and older than ourselves. None of this takes into account,

(02:30):
of course, the insects and dangerous wild life and allergens,
and poor weather and getting lost, but I promise you
that none of that will be an issue in today's story.
In Japan, shinrin yoku, or forest bathing, has been shown
to decrease blood pressure and heart rate while increasing calm
and focus. Our exposure slows us, It changes our breathing,

(02:54):
It reconnects us. No clocks, no inbox, no worries. It's
literally good for your soul, your body, and your mind.
It has been shown to lower levels of the stress
hormone cortisol, and it can even stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system.
We've talked about that one before. It's the part of

(03:14):
our internal wiring that slows your heart rate and helps
your body calm down from stress. And like I suggested
right off the top, we spend a good chunk of
our lives preoccupied with our genitals. But if I may,
we should really spend our time figuring out different ways
to stroke our parasympathetic nervous system. You couldn't even imagine

(03:35):
a life without it. You wouldn't even be here if
some ancestor of yours had seen a predator started to
panic and just never calm down again. You can activate
it by slowing your breathing and relaxing your muscles and
focusing on gentle, deep breaths. I mean, this is fairly
simple stuff. Humming can do it. Hugs and warm blankets

(03:56):
can do it. And today I want to help you
call the far down by not doing breathing exercises or
dunking yourself and freezing water. No. Today we will be
taking in the great outdoors in one of the most
exotic locations in the world. Today marks our glorious return

(04:17):
to the beautiful island nation of New Zealand. The air
is cleaner, the greens are greener, and you'll remember from
our last visit. It has landscapes like something out of
a fantasy novel, where every winding road seems to lead
to some hidden beach or a waterfall never before seen
by human eyes. It's the kind of place that makes

(04:38):
you grateful that you came and makes everyone else wish
you would just shut up about it already. And the
first part of our story will be kind of nice,
like kind of really nice. Actually, the last time we
were here, we spent our time only vaguely eyeballing the
country at night through a storm from a boat. This
time will be getting much more on the ground and

(05:00):
close up with mud on our boots. We are going
to be spending our time today at the Paparoa National Park.
This is a part of the world. That answers the
question what if God merged the beaches of remote Hawaiian
islands with the landscape from the Lord of the Rings
like he was just smashing toy cars together. We will
be overlooking the Tasman Sea on the west coast of

(05:22):
New Zealand's southern island, Tawapanamu now the North Island or
tae Igamaui has more of the white sandy beaches that
tourist grave, but here on the southern island this is
home to the southern Alps and lush native forests and
limestone cliffs and canyons and caves and underground streams, and
an indescribable coastline. I mean travel writers have been paid

(05:47):
to try for years to make it describable, and a
majority describe it as almost prehistoric. These terms like untamed
and ancient and cinematic with wild, untouched panorama vistas and
sweeping surf and sunsets often called fiery or soul stirring.
Visitor say, this is the place you would expect to

(06:09):
find an extinct species hiding behind some tree. Take whatever
it is you imagine a Jurassic paradise to be, and
just know that it looks like an airport parking lot
compared to Paparoa National Park. If we weren't part of
a tour group today, we'd probably just stand there staring
a dog with our mouths hanging open until eventually we

(06:32):
just had to lay down and rest for the night.
And yes, believe it or not, we will be joining
a group of twenty people, mostly students from the Thai
Putini Polytechnic Institute. We will be joining them with one
of their teachers and a duty officer from the Department
of Conservations Twuinakaiki Field Center studying outdoor recreation. The Department

(06:54):
of Conservation is pretty new and people here just call
it DOC only founded in nineteen eighty seven as part
of a push to corral and restructure New Zealand's environmental
and land management agencies together. The sign above the door
said that their mission was to conserve New Zealand's natural
and historic heritage for all to enjoy now and in

(07:17):
the future. And that is no small feat. In New Zealand,
at least on the Southern island, national parks and reserves
make up about a third of its total land mass.
When I started trying to compare New Zealand and Canada
here to find out which of us has more protected parkland,
you know, per capita. The comparison became kind of meaningless,

(07:38):
and it fairly bummed me out to hear of my
country described by the sheer volume of harsh and remote
and empty bogland and tundra that they call unlivable New Zealand,
though this is an entire nation where blossoms and bird
song pour from around every tree, and the air itself
is crisp with a hint of salt spray. Today we

(08:02):
will be hiking into Paparoa, and a lot of hikers
say that the experience makes them feel small but deeply
connected because the land is oddly overwhelming but welcoming, if
that makes sense. We will be heading in taking about
a thirty minute hike to an overlook in the Cave
Creek area. These students are actually here today as part

(08:25):
of their Outdoor Recreation and Adventure Tourism degree. The Cave
Creek area was set in a rainforest and offered water
and cliffs and caves. It was an ideal location for
an outdoor recreation course, and our story today takes place
April twenty eighth, nineteen ninety five. At the heart of

(08:47):
the park lay Cave Creek or Cotty hoty Ha if
you're local, which I'm not, so I apologize for my pronunciation.
The hike into Cave Creek begins as a narrow dirt
ribbon that leads away from the parking lot and eventually
disappears into a practical cathedral of greenery. And we're here
pretty early, so there is still mist hanging in the air,

(09:10):
which glowed in shafts of brilliant sunlight as it broke
through the canopy above. The whole effect gives this place
a bit of a Hearts of Darkness vibe. We walk
in a single file, twisting and dipping as we fare
deeper and deeper into Paparoa, past tree ferns as big
as umbrellas, and vines that hang in loose loops that

(09:31):
sway when brushed. And there are trees around us that
reach as high as two hundred feet or sixty meters.
So understand when I described it as being like a
green cathedral. This is a big environment. Everything is green,
and everything looks wet, and birds are everywhere, along with

(09:52):
plenty of things that like to squeak or croak or chirp,
And as we get closer to the creek, you can
start to hear a faint cascade water. As we start
to emerge past the treeline and the bush starts to
open up, light starts filtering a little easier now through
the canopy above, and we arrive at a chasm with
a viewing platform suspended over the creek deep below. The

(10:16):
vertical walls of the chasm were steep sheer rock made
from pale limestone and carpeted with moss and lichen and
ferns and vines, and this whole thing had been carved
out by the creek over millennia. The floor of the
gorge was strewn with the kind of large, smoothish looking
boulders that have been worn down by flowing water over
thousands of years. Think of it like a scaled down

(10:39):
version of the American Grand Canyon, but with one big difference.
If you squint one hundred and thirty feet down, you
can see the pale green water of the creek emerging
from the resurgence at the bottom. The hell's over surgence,
you ask, well, it's a point where an underground stream
or river flows back to the surface after traveling through

(11:00):
a cave or some subterranean passage, and the water here
originated from rainwater and surface streams that kind of drain
through the porous limestone, sinkholes and fractures from across the
Papaolla plateau. The whole area is riddled with underground caves
and drainage systems, and it all travels through these crazy

(11:21):
subterranean passages and pops up elsewhere like here. It's at
the bottom of a forty meter or one hundred and
thirty foot chasm. Like I said, that's about as tall
as just over twenty two Dodge caravans stacked on top
of each other. It's deep enough that it is typically
about five degrees cooler at the bottom than the forested

(11:42):
plateau above. The cave. Greek platform was built here specifically
because of this incredible natural feature, and it kind of
became a natural treasure in a land made out of
natural treasures. It was built only a year before our visit,
so it was pretty new, and the time Puttini Polytechnic,
the school that we'll be joining, Yeah, just as new.

(12:04):
It was only established the year before, and it wasn't huge,
but it was helping fill a lack of higher learning
institutions in this part of the country. To be clear,
there are plenty of schools in New Zealand, but schools
of higher education were found in the cities and they
were trying to change that. Tai Poutini, as fun as
it is to say, was found in Greymouth, which is

(12:27):
the largest town in this part of the country, so
it's not exactly like it was donated by Oprah by helicopter.
If you're looking at a map halfway up the South
Island's west coast, right across from christ Church where the
Gray River meets the Tasman Sea, that's pretty close to Greymouth,
and Greymouth is also only about forty five kilometers or
twenty eight miles south of the park, so that's handy.

(12:51):
Thai Poutini offered a fairly diverse range of courses, everything
from music and audio engineering to mining and tradeswork to
outdoor rect creation and adventure tourism. Like we said, the
students we're here with today are studying geology, conservation and
recreational management. Kit Pozzy was only seventeen years old when

(13:12):
he moved to Greymouth to study adventure tourism. His family said,
he was just loving living on the coast and loving
the course and all the adventurous out doorsy things to do.
To him, the idea of skiing and paddling and caving
and tramping and mountain climbing as a career, yes, please,
they said. He felt alive and full of possibility for

(13:35):
the future, and I hardly blame him. The viewing platform
was erected by the Department of Conservation literally a year earlier,
in April of nineteen ninety four. Again like we said,
and from above you could see the churn of white
water erupting from the rock and calming into a dark
green tinged pool before continuing downstream through the gorge. Students

(13:59):
were naturally drawn to this spectacular environment, and the idea
of walking out over a deep gorge with rushing water
far below was right up their alley. In this case,
the platform extended beyond the rock face, which created the
sensation of floating above the chasm. It was, to all appearances,
a perfectly ordinary viewing platform, timber, decking posts, railing, really

(14:23):
not any different from any other dock platform or deck
or whatever was built across the rest of the country,
so nothing to worry about. It wasn't overly creaky or wobbly.
But there isn't a platform suspended over a drop like
this anywhere in the world that doesn't demand a certain
degree of nervous laughter or jokes. And do you know

(14:45):
the paleontological reason we do that. It's actually a social
response that we developed way back when we were all
still stunted little monkey people, and its main purpose was
to communicate that a situation was safe for non three.
If I said in some episode that someone was violently
grazed by a truck and although they survived and lived

(15:07):
a long and full life, they had to do it
without their penis, you'd probably laugh because my explanation subverted
the obvious danger, and it would have nothing to do
with this guy getting his knob blasted off by the
passing truck. Even today, primates like chimps and gorillas will
do it while beating on you as a way of
letting you know that they're just playing and they're not

(15:28):
really trying to kill you. One of the students wondered
aloud if they would all fit on the platform, and
around eleven twenty five that morning, the main group of
seventeen students and Steven O'Day from the Department of Conservation
all gathered on the platform to peer over the edge
into the abyss. There were laughs and some lighthearted shoving,

(15:49):
and one of them, a kid named Stacy Mitchell, and
a few of his friends even started shaking the platform
a little. It's that same impulse that makes kids try
to plummet an elevator by jumping up down in it,
you know, just fallen around. One of them even said, hey,
I hope it doesn't collapse, but no one yelled jinks,
And as the group was still midchuckle, someone heard the

(16:11):
faintest creak. A few curious looks were shared, and a
moment later, the wood underfoot groaned out loud. The platform
was suddenly swaying alarmingly, and the whole group stepped back
from the edge, shifting their weight, and it began to
tilt until it reached about a forty five degree angle,
forcing everyone to lurch forward before the whole thing tore

(16:33):
free from the lip of the gourd with this entering
crack and launched into free fall. If there's anything more
physically frightening than sudden, unexpected weightlessness. I don't know what
that is. The ground beneath your feet dropping away has
to be the most unnatural sensation a body can endure.
We as a species cherish our long and positive relationship

(16:56):
that we've always shared with gravity. You have taken the constant,
reassuring press of earth underfoot for granted, since the moment
that you were born. And now your stomach lurches upward
and your inner ears floods with panic signals, and suddenly
you're suspended in a void where you have nothing to grab,
nothing to hold, no control whatsoever. For the first few seconds,

(17:19):
the platform remained intact and fell in one piece without
breaking up, but as it plunged, it crashed through trees,
breaking apart as it went, with timber and crossbraces and
decking planks all coming loose, before coming to a violent
rest with a sickening crash that echoed up through the canyon.
At first, there was a moment of silence before groans

(17:40):
and the first ragged cries for help began wafting up.
At the bottom lay a tangled heap of splintered wood
and nails, and people scattered among the large rocks. The
group's tutor of visitor center manager Shirley Sladder and three
other students who had not been on the platform at
the time, raced his see what happened, and as they

(18:02):
arrived at the lip, they noticed an empty space, and
then they saw their friend's bodies below at the bottom
of the ravine, impossibly far away. Caroline Smith lay in
a world of hurt. She remembered clutching flimsily at branches
as she fell, before coming to a sudden stop smashing
onto the rocks. And a trauma surgeon might quote you

(18:24):
fifty percent odds of surviving a fall fifteen meters or
fifty feet that's about the height of a five story building.
The odds of surviving an unprotected fall forty meters or
one hundred and thirty feet onto a hard surface fit
nicely into the low single digits. But by some miracle
of impact logistics, of the eighteen people who accompanied the

(18:47):
platform to the bottom of the chasm, four survived. Caroline
got off relatively lucky. She found herself with the pain
of a fractured ankle, a femur, and a collar bone.
Steved Hannon was decidedly less lucky. He broke eighteen different
bones including his jaw and his spine, and both of

(19:09):
his lungs collapsed. His bowels ruptured, and he developed blood
clots on the brain and went into full cardiac arrest twice.
He would spend the next two months in an intensive
care unit and another year in a spinal unit. He
survived with severe head and spinal injuries, and he was
left paralyzed from below the neck. Sam Lucas suffered from

(19:33):
severe knee and ligament damage and had trauma which left
him thirty three percent disabled with no memory of how
any of it happened. Stacy Mitchell survived with the slap
side of her body extensively bruised. Even her kidney and
her lungs were bruised. Before the story, I wasn't even
aware a lung could be bruised. Twelve people lay dead

(19:56):
or dying around them, and eight were still alive. Jody
Davis and Barry Hobson are often thought of having died immediately,
but they were simply unconscious with massive internal trauma. They
never regained consciousness after the fall and didn't suffer. Scott Murray,
on the other hand, suffered critical head injuries. He had

(20:17):
bilateral subdural hematomas and deep brain injuries. He also had
a major lower back fracture, severely bruised lungs, and a
broken arm. He passed away from a combination of the
hemorrhages and lung injury. Meanwhile, at the top of the chasm,
the rest of their group made a plan. Two of

(20:38):
the students, Mark Trainer and Shirley Slatter would run back
to the parking lot to get help, while the other
three stayed behind and used what skills they had to
try and help from there. I think the keys to
the van were actually at the bottom of the gorge,
and Mark found himself bicycling eight kilometers or five miles
to the nearest phone. Within two hours of the disaster, ambulance, helicopters,

(21:01):
and search and rescue teams from all over Graymouth flooded
the area and poured over the scene. I tried doing
the math, and as near as I can tell, those
two hours would have felt like just over eleven months.
Seventeen year old Kit Posey was found trapped in the
wreckage with crush injuries and trauma from the fall. He
was unconscious and breathing very poorly. He never regained consciousness

(21:25):
and they think that he may have passed away from
his injuries while being airlifted out of the gorge. So
you're walking through your local woods when you happen upon
a viewing platform designed by beavers and convicts without a
single engineering degree among them. You're standing on the thing
when a bolt flies free and the structure becomes a

(21:47):
kind of a catapult that flings you into free fall.
Would you know what to do? So, there's no real
gambling against gravity or falling, I mean, falling from a
height is a bit of a problem. There's simply no
real way to beat gravity. At best, at very best,
you can only improve your odds of survival. The height

(22:10):
of your fall is sadly non negotiable, and it determines
the speed and force with which you are going to hit.
You know, like we said earlier, we've talked about this before.
What increasing your drag or resistance by any means during
a fall can do to improve your chances. Billowing a jacket,
bouncing off a wall, grasping at branches, Every little bit

(22:31):
counts in the final math. The rest is determined by
what you land on and what position you're in when
you do, and how long you have to then hold
that pose, waiting for rescue. Another way of saying that
is that your outcome depends largely on how far you fall,
how hard you hit, how pointy or generally unwelcoming the
thing that you land on is, and what your body's

(22:54):
doing at the moment of impact. When falling from heights
under fifty feet or fifteen meters, still moving fast about
thirty nine miles or sixty three kilometers an hour, but
your choices can still make a difference. For falls over
one hundred feet or thirty meters, you can pretty much
double those speeds. Your goal should be to lengthen out

(23:15):
your flight by any means imaginable, and avoid landing head
first or splayed out now Ideally on the way down,
you are aiming for something a little forgiving, like bushes
or small trees, or deep snow, or a tent or
a cardboard box, even a car roof, or even loose soil,
literally anything that deforms on impact, which absorbs some of

(23:37):
the energy that otherwise would scramble your organs like eggs.
A dozen little impacts is better than one big one
for the landing. And I know this will sound bad,
and you're going to be all well, you first, professor,
but here goes. You are going to want to try
to line up your feet first, with your legs together
and your knees and your hips bent, but not keep

(24:01):
your core tight, your chin tucked, and your arms enclose
to protect your chest and face so you don't end
up kneeing your own head off on impact. Try to
land on the balls of your feet and let your
motion continue into a side roll, you know, calf to
thigh or hip slash ass to side slash back. Think
of the way a parachutist or a parkore artist will

(24:21):
roll for safety. And this is the kind of thing
that you can practice at home at slow speed from
you know, a foot off the ground, and then just
speed it up as you get really good at it.
In the off chance you should ever need to actually
use this skill one day, or you drive your knees
up through your torso into your collarbone. It's not an

(24:42):
enviable scenario. The first helicopter to arrive lower to scoop
net to airlift students to awaiting ambulances where they could
be treated outside of stunt piloting and trying to do
a loop to loop in a helicopter. This kind of
airlifting is likely the most hairy and difficult thing a
helicopter pilot can do. It requires specialized training and protocols

(25:06):
and patients. Hovering a helicopter perfectly still over a relatively
very narrow slice in the earth while your rotor down
wash blows leaves and dirt and all manner of lofty
debris is a mess, and even a small wind can
push the tail rotor and ruin your alignment. Be familiar
with the old game of operation, where if you touch

(25:26):
the sides of the incision point with your scalpel, get push. Well,
same idea here. Pilots need a steady hand. Now imagine
how it is for the patient being winched. The entire
height downash and improper anti rotation taglining can lead to spinning,
which would be the only thing keeping you from eating

(25:47):
your fill of that aforementioned airborne debris and the sound
of those rotors can be as loud as listening to
a car horn from arm's length. All of that said,
As frightening as all of this was, it was nothing
compared with the trip into the gorge. Two of the
survivors were taken to Greymouth Hospital just ten minutes away
by air, while the other two, more seriously injured, were

(26:10):
flown all the way to christ Church Hospital almost an
hour away. The victims' bodies were transported to a makeshift
morgue set up at Greymouth Hospital. The disaster only took seconds,
but the fallout would last for years now. As a
quick aside, the last time we were here, I made
a point about how the world at large has a

(26:32):
serious attention deficit issue around Oceania, specifically Australia and New Zealand.
As far as the news cycles go, they're basically no
different than Wonder Woman's Invisible Island Canada's kind of the same.
The world at large pays such scant attention to these places,
and in keeping with the spirit of the show, I

(26:52):
am certain that ninety eight percent of you never heard
of the Cave Creek disaster before today. Partially that is
because on this same day, about ten thousand kilometers or
six thousand miles away in Dagu, South Korea, something happened
that stole all of the attention and guaranteed that no
one outside of New Zealand ever heard of Cave Creek.

(27:15):
At a subway construction site beneath one of the city's
busiest roads. Workers had been digging away and laying new
foundations for some underground infrastructure. They knew what they were doing.
What they didn't know was that just below them, a
ruptured pipe had been quietly filling the air with gas,
And just as importantly, the other thing that they didn't

(27:36):
know was the source of ignition that turned that gas
into an explosive inferno. A sudden roar shook the ground,
an asphalt keeled back and ripped like paper as the
gas transformed into a wall of fire and debris. As
a section of the road hundreds of meters long ripped apart,
leaving twisted metal and bloodied faces in its wake. More

(27:59):
than a high hundred people lost their lives in an instant,
including dozens of school children. Over two hundred were left injured,
mostly with severe burns, and images of rescuers carrying the
limp bodies of uniformed children shocked that entire corner of
the globe. So you can kind to see how something
like that might steal a little thunder from New Zealand

(28:22):
and pushing Cave Creek to page thirty seven of the newspaper,
Both incidents involve students and think so when flying only
one made world headlines and the other is commemorated as
respectfully as possible. Here. So what happened? Well back in
nineteen ninety two, when the dock was trying to better

(28:44):
the visitor experience to their various attractions. One of their
ideas was a trail and viewing platform to really bring
the Cave Creek area to life. So where to begin? Well,
they asked a dock conservation officer named Hans von Diek
to draw up some plans, and he read a few
papers for inspiration and ponied up a rough sketch of

(29:06):
a platform design. He wasn't working from a copy of
the New Zealand Building Standards Guide, and why would he.
He wasn't an engineer by trade. His previous training had
been as a motor mechanic. Either way, his napkin sketch
was treated as construction plans and approved. Fendek's plan called
for a seven meter or twenty three foot steel section

(29:28):
to be cut into straps that would tie timber decking
to a concrete counterweight. The best way to think about
what they were building here was like a timber deck
sticking out of the gorge like a diving board, with
three lines of timber posts or piles and beams or
bearers to support it, along with a set of concrete
steps leading to the deck as the counterweight. The idea

(29:50):
was the piles and bearers would be secured to the
concrete with steel straps and bolts. Making sure that this
thing wasn't going anywhere. Most everything had been prefabricated in
a workshop and delivered to the site by helicopter, and
a four man dot crew were sent to assemble and
build the platform on site over a two day period.

(30:10):
I mean, how hard could it be. They brought their
sunscreen and their bug spray, and they didn't have a
copy of the construction plans with them, and I guess
the thing was on top of the plans. They also
forgot to bring a drill, so no drill equals no bolts,
and because they weren't going to be able to screw
the bolts in by hand, they just hucked them into

(30:32):
the woods nearby. But they did have the entire weekend
ahead of them, so they just started using nails instead.
Let's see what else went wrong. The wood delivered to
this site turns out to have been of inferior quality,
meaning it was the kind of stuff that would have
rotted away if the platform had lasted for more than
a year, and the steel straps they also never reached

(30:55):
the site, so when the concrete steps were poured, the
deck ended up being lit really held to the gorge
by nails, not even long ones. Some of the joints
were covered in those half nailed, half folded over nails
stamped into the wood. This is a lot of cut
corners for one project, but since no one was going
to be checking their work, they just went for it.

(31:17):
The whole thing had a real good enough vibe to it,
and with all of those people standing at the front
of the platform, their weight caused the front joists to
slip down the piles, the balance of the load shifted backwards,
and the rest just ripped free, the same way the
claw of a hammer can pull a nail out of
a board. Worth pointing out there was a warning sign

(31:38):
marking a five person maximum for the platform, but it
hadn't been installed either. And I'm not saying that the
builders were high, but I am saying that they were
builders in name only. The resulting investigation by a commission
of inquiry found twelve major problems and oversights. No qualified
engineers were involved, not even a carpenter. You got nails

(32:02):
instead of bolts, and the steps to the platform, which
were supposed to be attached as a counterweight, weren't. One
grieving parent described what they had built as a booby trap.
And remember those plans. Well, they realized they never got
a building consent for it. That's just a whole other
legal thing. So they scrambled to retroactively put something in

(32:24):
place to cover their butts. That's when they realized the
original plan had gone missing all together. The napkin or
whatever it was scribbled on was just gone. So they
redrew the plans kind of from memory to staple to
their paperwork. Well, actually they got an unqualified volunteer exchange
student to redraw it for them. And I'm not saying

(32:47):
that this place was completely dysfunctional, but they got confused
about the application process, and after all of that, the
paperwork never even got filed. And because of that, the
whole thing never appeared in an any kind of registry,
so it was never going to be up for inspection anyway.
The resulting commission effectively took a handful of feces and

(33:08):
placed it into a high speed fan. For what it
was worth. They laid blame on the construction crew, whoever
hired them, whoever ordered the insufficient materials, whoever delivered the
wrong materials, all those involved in approving a crayon doodle,
the lack of project management, the lack of construction oversight,
and whoever cut the ribbon when this mess was done.

(33:30):
They also noted the department as a whole was seriously
fubar with systemic problems. They were underfunded and under resource
to the point where they couldn't function without cutting corners.
The coffee mugs at their offices were just empty toilet
paper rolls sealed with tape at the bottom. All that said,
when it came time to assign the prison terms and

(33:51):
the beheadings, everyone who touched this thing, from the jags
who slapped together the platform to the head office bureaucrats
who rubber stamped it, were a soonerated the thing about
trying to spank a governmental organization. At the time, under
the law, the government wasn't able to spank itself, so
why try? And there were three further government and dock reviews,

(34:14):
but saying investigators found the tragedy at Cave Creek was
almost bound to happen, and if not here, somewhere else,
oh crap, somewhere else's dock rangers and engineers would end
up walking twelve eight hundred ninety kilometers or about eight
thousand miles to visit and evaluate the condition and safety

(34:35):
of five hundred and twenty other dock structures of one
hundred and six viewing platforms across the country. Fifteen were
immediately closed to bring them up to new safety standards,
and some of the bridges and platforms were now labeled
with signs like one person maximum inspections were now made annually.
And you can bet that the department got a huge

(34:58):
bump in their coffers after all the bag press about
their budgets, and they immediately spend forty five million of
it on safety. They also paid the families of those
involved in the incident two point six million dollars in compensation,
even though, and this is worth pointing out, they were
not legally obligated to do so. Still, for the families,

(35:21):
a law had clearly been broken and no one was
ever going to be held accountable, so they'll never really
get over it. That was the government. The dock managers
found a way to somehow outshame them. Rod Davis was
the father of eighteen year old Jody Davis. When he
was meeting with a senior DOC official, the leg on

(35:42):
his chair broke and the official said, uh, oh, we
don't need another cave creek. Reportedly, he thought Davis would laugh.
The families believed Conservation Minister Dennis Marshall and the Dock's
Director General, Bill Mansfield were culpable for creating this ill
fundage show in the first place, and lamented that flogging

(36:03):
and whipping had been outlawed in nineteen forty one. Bruce
Watson was the most senior DOC official to resign over
this mess. Dennis Marshall later stepped down a little begrudgingly,
but Bill Mansfield straight up refused to quit until he
finally kind of surrendered his position in nineteen ninety seven.

(36:24):
The Prime Minister at the time was Jim Bulger, leader
of the National Party. He said, somewhat angrily, I might
add that the platform failed because it lacked about twenty
dollars worth of bolts to hold it together. There was
actually a separate christ Church police investigation that recommended charges

(36:44):
for several dock staff were talking manslaughter, but like the drill,
the bolts, the plans, the building approval, and so many
other things that went missing along the way the report,
they needed to even push the matter forward on also
when missing, so eventually it was decided to just give up.

(37:05):
As for the victims, without getting into it, they continued
to live in incredible physical, emotional and mental pain. Carolyn
Smith suffered a mental breakdown. Stacy Mitchell turned to drugs
and alcohol to numb himself from his new reality. However,
I am happy to say he opened up to his

(37:25):
family and since entered recovery. Stephen Hannon was perhaps the
most heavily affected by the tragedy. He became a tetraplegic
that day and spent a long time learning how to
deal with his injuries, but in the years since he
has become a mentor to disadvantaged young people. For the

(37:46):
parents of those who were lost, the real pain comes
from knowing their child is not supposed to die before them.
They ruined their lives and now all they could do
was try to make the best of what they had left.
Some take a little solace in knowing that today every

(38:07):
visitor to the park, domestic and international, to every park
across the country, everyone who crosses a bridge, or uses
a platform, or interacts with any dock infrastructure, is safer.
Because of the legacy of that terrible day, the dock
did change up things internally too. If anything like this

(38:29):
were to ever happen again, you would now know who's
head to sever and because they changed the Crown Organization's
Criminal Liability Act to remove immunity, you would now be
able to properly lop it off. Fat lot of good
that did the families here. Of course, a memorial plaque
was placed on the Cave Creek trailhead memorials have also

(38:51):
gone up, and the trail itself reopened to the public
in nineteen ninety eight, but the platform overlooking Cave Creek
was never placed. This was a human failure and a
system failure, and a funding failure and an oversight failure.
I mean, you name it. But at least it made

(39:11):
people aware and sparked change, and the death toll here
was certainly lower than other famous New Zealand disasters like
our Wahine episode, for example, but the Cave Greek Platform
disaster of nineteen ninety five's impact on the country's feeling
around public safety was way more powerful. New Zealand has

(39:33):
experienced all manner of disasters, natural, mechanical, industrial, but this
is the first mass casualty disaster we have covered, not
just in New Zealand but anywhere really that was entirely
due to governmental negligence. The government of New Zealand in

(39:54):
nineteen ninety five was hardly the worst or the most
corrupt government in the world. My larger point being, as
it happens, it didn't have to be. This one was
kind of a love letter to those of you who
love our structural failure in engineering gone wild episodes, and

(40:17):
of course big business or the government is trying to
kill you types. Cave Greek was more than just a
structural failure, and the story is unique in that category
because it is again the only engineering disaster we've covered
that lacked any trace of actual engineering. With every building
you enter, every bridge you cross, every interaction you have

(40:39):
with every man made thing in the world, your safety
rests in the hands of thoughtful and well trained engineers.
The people in positions of responsibility here dropped the ball
and then walked behind it, just kicking it repeatedly. So
innocence died terribly and unnecessarily, and at the end, the
legal system just dusted its hands and called it a day.

(41:02):
No one was culpable or responsible for any of it,
and we would call this a bad day at school episode.
But you know I do not like episodes where kids die.
And yes, college and university students, there's still kids legal
adulthood Schmiegelschmidt schmlthood. The next time we visit this part
of the world, I promise we will be destroying part

(41:24):
of Australia. And for those New Zealanders listening, we haven't
even touched on your more famous disasters yet, but we will.
To my previous point about not loving killing children, I
don't love it when we kill anyone, but you do.
And I promise this was merely a palate lenser compared
to where we are going to go next. I don't

(41:47):
want to call it a head to toe bloodbath. Nope,
that's it. I'll tell you more about it at the end.
If your porch, deck or couch wasn't engineered to riddle
you with broken wooden planks or scissor you and half.
Why not continue your tradition of putting money behind well
made things by becoming a supporter of the show at

(42:07):
Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo. The majority of Patreon
supporters sign up to make a small monthly donation to
sustain the show that they love, and then just disappear
extra content, all the good stuff, and add free episodes
which for everyone else. I am truly sorry about these ads.
They're not in my control. They're just not in my control.

(42:30):
For my supporters, your donations are the whole reason that
I've even been able to do this show as often
as I have over the last five years. And if
you're all Patreon, you could always just visit, buy me
a coffee dot com slash Doomsday, and show your support
with a one time donation. I want to offer a
quick and heartfelt shout out to TJ Brianna Watts, and

(42:53):
Johnny Wilke for helping support me on Patreon again. There
is no show without you, guys. You can reach out
to me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as Doomsday Podcast,
or just fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com.
Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one,
and while you're there, please leave us a review and

(43:15):
tell your friends. I always thank all my Patreon listeners,
new and old, for their support and encouragement. But if
you could spare the money and had to choose, I
always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic.
Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers
offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath

(43:35):
of disasters and crises. They are often the first and
sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in
life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over
six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can
learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot Ca. On the

(43:56):
next episode, I was going to do this story all
the way back in year one, but it was so
splat tacular and awful, with bloody limbs flying everywhere, I
honestly thought it was going to turn people off the show.
And I say that after I'd already done an episode
on the worst growing injury in history, the Saint Pierre

(44:17):
Volcanic bioswarm episode and the one where drunken matadors were
goreed mercilessly by bulls and had their faces sewn back
together in a parking lot. Well in the spirit of
the Halloween season, we are doing it. It's the Air
Africa Congo crash Tacular disaster of nineteen ninety six. We'll

(44:39):
talk soon, Savedy goggles off and thanks for listening.

All Episodes

The Cave Creek Platform Disaster of 1995 | Episode 95

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Cave Creek Platform Disaster of 1995 | Episode 95