Jimmy Allingham

And that consists of...

people from three iwi groups and after Horizon has discovered what had happened they really mobilised.

I think there were several dozen volunteers at the lake for that first weekend rescuing as many eels as they could and putting them in buckets of water and taking them to nearby waterways and even when I visited

A couple of days later, there were still a dozen or so iwi volunteers there.

And iwi are really leading the rescue operations and the regional council and DOCA, they're supporting them because it is a taonga species to them.

And many of them, I spoke to one man called Justin Tamihana, and he has customary fishing rights for the lake and other waterways.

And he said he was just devastated.

He talked about the multi-generational loss of eels.

And that's a factor here because even if you...

You rescue eels.

Will this population be restored here or not?

These are all the things we don't know at the moment.

I think many have.

I don't know if they've done any sort of comprehensive look into that, but they're putting them in nearby waterways.

And eels are resilient creatures.

They can live in the mud for quite a long time.

They can even, for periods of time, survive out of water.

And what we don't know, though, is how long this lake was dry for.

Regional council officials...

have said, oh, it could be a couple of weeks, it could be a bit longer, but we just don't know that.