Kelsey Waghorn

speaker

553 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 18 Jun

Kelsey Waghorn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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How Do You Cope? · Kelsey Waghorn: 'There’s nothing quite like someone telling you, "you are normal"' · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

Okay, so I work for a company called White Island Tours and true to its name, we took tours to White Island, which is a live volcano off the coast of Whakatane, which is where I live in New Zealand.

And on December 9th, 2019, we were taking a tour out to the island as per usual.

The island was at a higher risk level or alert level, but we'd been out there multiple times at this high alert level and nothing had happened.

And alert level doesn't always mean it's going to erupt, but it doesn't mean it won't not erupt, if it makes sense.

and the tour was absolutely totally normal until we were just over halfway and then the island just went into full eruption it was more or less silent which was really weird and my group which was one of three on the island at the time was probably the better located of the boat groups

And we happened to be down in some stream beds where there was some sort of rock coverage.

And so we were able to take cover for the duration of the eruption and the pyroclastic surge that came with it.

And the other group from my boat was sort of right out in the open walking away from the eruption.

So they had a lot less time and coverage there.

uh to get away from the eruption and then the other group which was a helicopter group on the island um they made a run for the sea and i think only two of them ended up with burns out of five um so there's 47 of us on the island at the time um most if i think all of my group made it off um initially anyway and we walked back down to the

the boat wharf or jetty and got back onto one of our other boats because the boat we came out on ended up engulfed in the pyroclastic surge so we couldn't take that one home we went home with a group that had just come off the island and made it back to Whakatane and went to hospital straight away I was there for until about 10 a.m so maybe about

three or four hours.

And then I was airlifted by Air Force helicopter down to Hutt Hospital, which is the other end of the North Island where I live.

And I was there for, I was in hospital for about 60 something days with burns to 45% of my body.

I know, like the company ran for 30 years and they really only had three major things go wrong.

And I was there for all three of them, unfortunately.

So my first one or the first one was our boat caught fire about a kilometre from the river entrance on our way back from Matoa.

And we got everyone off.

We all had to abandon ship and jump into the water.

Everyone got off the boat.

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