The Cave Creek Platform Disaster of 1995 | Episode 93

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 talk soon, Savedy goggles off and thanks for listening.