The entrance to Abbey Caves, Whāngarei, where searchers looking for a missing student recovered a body, after a school trip to the cave network.
Photo: RNZ / Tom Taylor

A month long rāhui has been placed over Abbey Caves, where a Whangārei boy’s High School student died in a caving incident on Tuesday.

Year 11 student Karnin Ahorangi Petera died after a group of students were trapped in the Abbey Caves after heavy rain.

Fourteen other students and two adults escaped.

Today, flowers were laid at the entrance of Whangārei Boys’ High School, a makeshift tribute to Petera.

Security guards were outside, however, the school was closed for the day.

Flowers outside Whangārei Boys’ High School in tribute to the student who died on Tuesday on a school trip to Abbey Caves.
Photo: RNZ / Jordan Dunn

On the road leading to the caves, a number of slips told of recent bad weather.

The entrance to the caves was gated at the road and surrounded by workers when RNZ arrived.

Nicki Wakefield from Ngāti Kahu o Torongare, the hapū of the Abbey Caves area, was among many different hapū members across Whangārei who gathered with kaumātua and whānau at the site to place a formal rāhui over the area.

A notice announcing a rāhui at the Abbey Caves
Photo: RNZ / Lucy Xia

It also meant a closure on fishing in the upper Whangārei Harbour area, Wakefield said.

It was important to come together and place the rāhui, she said.

Hapū members share the distress and sense of loss that people have been feeling throughout the community, Wakefield said, and they had a duty to manaaki and extend aroha, especially to the young people impacted.