A severely burned Australian woman who lost her father and sister in New Zealand’s White Island volcano eruption said she has been inundated with questions about why she and her family couldn’t just “jump in the water.”
Stephanie Browitt, 25, of Melbourne, whose sister Kristal Eve Browitt, 21, and father, Paul, died along with 19 other people in the Dec. 9, 2019, eruption, said she still gets asked why she couldn’t escape the island for the high seas.
“Well, as you can see that’s us, circled, on the island that day at 2:10 p.m. and the walls are extremely high up, and we are only surrounded by rock,” Browitt , who suffered horrific burns across 70 percent of her body, explained earlier this month in a TikTok video.
“We are nowhere near the jetty and nowhere near the ocean. We are as inland as you can get and under 140 meters from the crater,” she continues.
“So my family and I were at the back of that line, and it was only about a two-minute walk, we had only just started walking back to the jetty,” Browitt says.
She then showed a photo from around a minute and 40 seconds later of the island “already engulfed in ash and dust.”
“So, we were never, ever, ever going to make it to water. There was literally no chance for the group of 21 people I was with,” she adds.
Stephanie Browitt’s sister Kristal Eve Browitt (left) died in the eruption. Instagram / Stephanie Coral Brow
A volcano erupted on White Island, New Zealand, on December 9, 2019. Lillani Hopkins via APBrowitt’s mother, Marie, remained aboard their cruise ship, Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas, during the fateful day and was unharmed.
