Safety concerns before Cook Strait mayday, which had hospital on standby for mass casualties

Wellington Hospital was on standby for mass casualties as Cook Strait ferry Kaitaki drifted towards a rocky coast in an incident preceded by Maritime NZ raising safety and maintenance concerns with Interislander.

The news came to light on Tuesday in a regional transport committee – made up of the Wellington region’s councils, KiwiRail, and Waka Kotahi – where Maritime NZ presented.

Wellington City Councillor Iona Pannett, a committee member, understood hospitals were warned the incident could have easily become a “mass casualty” event.

“The [Maritime NZ] inquiry should come up with what happened and what the level of risk is and what the hospital was being told,” she said outside the meeting. “The alarming thing is that the public didn’t know that the systems are not up to scratch.”

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Kaitaki, carrying 864 people, lost power on January 28. Anchors held and engineers restarted the engines – but not before the ship had been driven by strong wind more than a nautical mile towards the rocky coast and was just 0.9 nautical miles from the shore.

A Transport Accident Investigation Commission preliminary report into the incident found the failure was in an 18-year-old rubber component, which was well overdue for replacement.

Jamie Duncan, from Te Whatu Ora Capital, said it was standard procedure for emergency services to alert the hospital to events “that are assessed as potential mass casualty incidents”. The Kaitaki mayday was one such event, as were the Christchurch mosque shooting, the Whakaari-White Island eruption and the recent Loafers Lodge fire.

The alert meant emergency management protocols were activated. This meant making sure services, clinical spaces, and staff were on standby and ready to receive patients while continuing to deliver services as normal.

Maritime NZ chief executive Kirstie Hewlett on Tuesday told the regional transport committee that Maritime NZ had identified “safety and maintenance” issues with Interislander before the Kaitaki mayday.

She would not reveal details of the deficiencies as this could result in operators hiding details from Maritime NZ, she said.

Speaking after the meeting, Hewlett said the issues were raised with KiwiRail’s chief executive late in 2022 and he, with his board, took them seriously and had started “to look into them”. This was before the Kaitaki incident.

“At that stage we had not identified a major non-conformity in relation to the Kaitaki, which is the threshold for us to detain a vessel.”

Interislander general operations manager Duncan Roy said it was unclear what maintenance issues Maritime NZ was referring to.

“Any issues Maritime NZ may have raised with Interislander during any of its regular audits will have been addressed, or there will be a plan to address these to Maritime New Zealand’s satisfaction, before we are cleared to sail,” he said.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Kaitaki incident it transpired that New Zealand no longer had an open water rescue vessel able to haul stricken ships to safety.

It was recently reported that the Government was seeking “urgent advice” from Maritime NZ about a solution to the issue.

Tuesday’s committee briefing detailed more on the options being considered with the Cook Strait the main focus.

The four options were staying with the status quo of using existing harbour tugs with ”very limited” capability, through to optimising existing vessels with better equipment, to getting tugs with emergency tow ability. The final option was an emergency tow vessel dedicated to the job.