Depauw ran to the water’s edge and leapt. “Jump into the water!” he screamed at his guests. On land, Depauw heard the cries and saw what was about to happen.
“Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!” he shouted. Kelsey Waghorn’s group of 21, near the shore, were seconds from following them. Deep inside the crater, guide Hayden Marshall-Inman’s group of 21 had disappeared. Already engulfed, or about to be, were his 42 passengers. He was anchored in the path of a 60-mile-per-hour gas and rock tsunami. In Crater Bay on the Phoenix’s sister ship, the Te Puia Whakaari, captain David Plews had no such chance. As he yelled at everyone to get inside, the boat’s skipper gunned south, then made a wide curve around to the west and north, sidestepping the ash cloud like a matador executing a pass. Paul Kingi, crewing on the Phoenix, saw the blast drop down onto the sea and hurtle toward his boat. “Huge smoke coming very quickly … getting massive so fast,” was how Kauffmann’s wife, Aline, described it to reporters. Its focused direction suggests that the crater amphitheater, with its high sides and single exit through a collapsed southern wall, has acted like a cannon: the explosion bounced off the caldera’s back and sides and is barrelling out the opening. The color and texture indicate a mix of rock, ash, and acid gas, a superheated pyroclastic flow. The initial eruption is followed moments later by a second blast, a dark gray avalanche that shoots out horizontally, directly toward the camera. The clip shows a vast ball of cloud roll out of the crater, then, soundlessly and impossibly fast, swallow the island. Just inland from the island’s rocky southern beach, with four middle-aged German clients he had brought in by chopper an hour earlier, pilot Brian Depauw glanced around to see a mammoth cumulus silently fill the sky behind him, then “go vertical.” Off the island’s east coast, on the Phoenix with a few dozen other tourists, Brazilian Allessandro Kauffmann captured the moment on video. The island would be packed with day-trippers. “We’ve just seen a volcano erupt!” Then, a shudder of dread. Fifty miles away on New Zealand’s North Island, a search and rescue helicopter crew returning to base watched, astonished, as a colossal mushroom unfurled on the horizon. Later, everyone who saw White Island erupt would remark on how quiet it was, how magnificent, and how swift.
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