It is the holidays and the Tauranga beaches are crowded with families. Children are playing and where last week there were tears, there's laughter again.
Mt Maunganui beach reopened to the public yesterday, and unless you look very closely there's no sign of New Zealand’s worst environmental disaster.
But looks can be deceiving, as Bjorn Waaling knows only too well - he's been through this before
Bjorn was working at a surf school in Spain when tonnes of oil was spilt, coating kilometres of coastline in thick black tar.
He's since moved to the mount where he runs his own surf school.
He doesn't claim to be an expert on oil spills, but he speaks from experience. Even after people were allowed back in the water in Spain, the effects of the oil were everywhere.
“You were allowed to, but on a daily basis people were coming out with big blobs of tar in their hair, surf boards were smeared with it, boats were affected. It's hard to clean,” he said.
Although people are allowed on particular stretches of beach, they're not allowed to swim, but for some, having a splash around was too hard to resist.
And while opening the beach is great news for the school holidays, Bjorn warns it's far from over
“Take today, [it] looks like a beautiful sandy beach. People would lie down, and during the day the oil would resurface. They would just scratch their back and say ‘hey, what's this?’ and there would be black spots everywhere because the oil had come back to the surface,” he said.
“Those stories happened three or four years later.”
With massive cracks in the hull of the Rena, and the weather getting worse, the fear is that she may break apart in the next few days.
Mount Maunganui revolves around the beach and the sea, but without the draw card of its best asset, the whole business community could be affected.
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