4 Feb 2020

Wild weather: Hikers survive as land slip smashes Routeburn hut

From Checkpoint, 6:11 pm on 4 February 2020

A Wellington couple on their honeymoon are celebrating a narrow escape after slips and flooding washed out parts of the Routeburn track almost wiping out the hut they were sheltering in.

Brett Studholme and his husband David had just left the Lake McKenzie hut as bad weather closed in.

Just before the track was closed, they climbed around a waterfall and made their way through a landslip knee-deep in mud to get to the Lake Howden hut, Studholme told Checkpoint.

They went to bed but were woken in the middle of the night as a land slip crashed through the hut.

"My next awareness was this shaking and noise… I kind of thought it was an earthquake and then I fell.

"I was on the top level of a bunk, my bunk just fell down, collapsed. I jumped off and saw that my bunk had collapsed on a young woman under me so I quickly heaved up the bunk, and my partner and some people dragged her out from underneath where she'd been kind of crushed there."

Studholme's husband is an emergency doctor and was able to check people for injuries.

"She was pretty bumped, bruised, but nothing looked like it was broken.

"Our bunkroom was smashed through. Other people heard this noise, were saying they thought it was thunder.

"Then the guy on the bottom bunk actually heard something hit the wall, jumped up out of his out his bed and this huge tree branch just came through his wall.

"If he hadn't have done that he would absolutely been taken out. He would've been gone.

Bunks were collapsed, walls were broken, and mud and branches were strewn through the hut, Studholme said.

"The whole hut was kind of on a lean, the main entrance-exit was blocked, you couldn't get out.

"A few of the support beams in the bottom floor were broken, cracked like a pencil."

It was 1am, with a long wait until daylight and hope of rescue, he said.

"We all quickly got into our wet-weather gear in case we had to go… Sitting in our wet clothes from the day's hike, wet socks, wet boots, for six hours.

"I was terrified. I was worried about more landslides coming down to clear us out completely, I was worried about the lake right in front of us that was rising so quickly.

"We were hearing through the radios that this was happening all over Fiordland at the moment."

He said when the sound of the helicopter came over, they were yelling with excitement. They were airlifted to a makeshift emergency centre in Glenorchy,

"They got us out so fast. They were landing, we were ready, six on, off it went… We were all out in half an hour."

Read more: Southland flooding: State of Emergency declared