Court of Appeal confirms Christchurch Adventure Park negligent in 2017 Port Hills fires case

The owners of the Christchurch Adventure Park, Leisure Investments NZ Partnership, has lost its appeal against a High Court decision and will now have to pay almost $14 million to the owners of homes damaged during the 2017 Port Hills fire.

Leisure Investments faced a claim alleging liability under s43 of the Forest and Rural Fires Act 1977 (now repealed), negligence and nuisance.

The park failed in its bid to overturn the High Court March 2021 decision that ordered the company to pay out the 80 plaintiffs.

The Court of Appeal says the High Court’s decision was right, and the owners of the Adventure Park are liable in negligence, nuisance and under s43 Forest and Rural Fires Act 1977 (now repealed).

The 80 claimants were awarded $10,296,041 in the 2021 High Court Case. The judge ordered that 5% interest was to be added for every year until the amounts are paid.

The High Court ruled the park - a mountain bike, hiking and zipline operation now majority-owned by the Christchurch City Council - had unwittingly helped spread the 2017 wildfires with its chairlift stating a reasonable operator in the position of Leisure Investments would have appreciated that the plastic on the chairs would melt and create a fire spread risk and would have removed the chairs.

The fires burned 1600 hectares of land, including forest in the 365 hectare adventure park, and destroyed nine homes and damaged five others.

The Port Hills fires in February 2017 were started by an arsonist which saw a large number of residential properties badly damaged, some completely destroyed.

The Port Hills fires were two separate fires - the Early Valley Road fire and the Marleys Hill fire, which started on Monday 13th February 2017 but by Wednesday night had combined.

The owners of damaged property claimed Leisure Investments was responsible for spot fires at the Adventure Park which joined with the Marleys Hill fire and damaged or destroyed their houses. It was accepted that were it not for those spot fires, the Marleys Hill fire would have passed well south of the houses and they would not have been affected.

The Adventure Park contains a chairlift that operated in a corridor of cleared pine trees and was used to ferry mountain bikers, zipliners and sightseers from the bottom of the Park to the top. During the fires, a decision was made to keep the chairlift running as a precaution to protect the haul rope from heat concentration - a step recommended by the chairlift’s operation and safety manual in the case of fire. Leisure Investments removed some but not all of the chairs and by early afternoon on Wednesday 15th February 2017, staff noticed a chair on fire when it was coming down the hill. The lift kept running. Some of the chairs ignited and molten plastic dripped onto pine slash, causing spot fires.

Although it was accepted that continuing to run the Park’s chairlift during the Port Hills fires was reasonable, the case centred on whether Leisure Investments should have removed the chairs which later melted onto dry slash and caught fire. The Court of Appeal agreed with the High Court that they should have, and there was time to do so.

Image: The 2017 Port Hills fire. Credit: Shutterstock.