People are still unaccounted for(Image: Getty )
It has been confirmed that two people have died in a deadly landslide caused by heavy rains in New Zealand.
Two separate landslides hit a house and a campground leaving at least two people dead as rescuers desperately search for others still buried in debris.
The community at Welcome Bay in Papamoa was hit at 4:50am by a landslide, officials have said. Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell described how two people escaped from a house there, while the borides of two who were trapped inside were found by rescuers hours later.
Hours later emergency services were called to a second slide at the base of nearby Mount Maunganui. A beachside holiday park in the town of the same name was struck by debris from the slide crushing vehicles, travel trailers and an amenities block.
Voices had been heard coming from under the debris at the Mount Maunganui slide, Fire and Emergency NZ commander William Pike said.
The scene of the landslide in New Zealand(Image: Associated Press)
“Members of the public … tried to get into the rubble and did hear some voices,” Pike told reporters. “Our initial fire crew arrived and – were able to hear the same. Shortly after our initial crew arrived, we withdrew everyone from the site due to possible movement and slip.”
Rescuers were still looking for people at the second site, with Police Superintendent Tim Anderson confirming the number of people missing was in “single figures.”
Dogs were being used to sniff for human victims amidst the rubble, with no survivors or bodies recovered by late Thursday from the Mount Maunganui site, Mitchell said.
“There was a shower block and a, sort of, combined shower block-kitchen block and there were people using that at the time the slide came through and they are some of the ones that we’re working hard to try and recover now,” Mitchell told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Another person is missing further north near Warkworth after a man was swept from a road by floodwaters on Wednesday morning as heavy rain lashed large swathes of the North Island, a police statement said.
Urging residents to heed advice from local authorities, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said: “Extreme weather continues to cause dangerous conditions across the North Island. Right now, the government is doing everything we can to support those impacted.”
Mark Mitchell wouldn’t comment as to whether any of those missing in the Mount Maunganui landslide were foreign nationals. “I’m not going to go into details on that because it is so sensitive,” he told ABC news.
He said there was still not an exact number for the missing people and authorities were reviewing footage from security cameras to establish who had left the campground before the disaster. Rescuers are “working as hard as they can to try and recover people from the slide”, he said. “But it’s a difficult and challenging site, because we could face further slides there.”