A documentary made for SPREP on the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption, the tsunami that followed an hour later, and the disaster waste response across Tonga.

Mude was commissioned by SPREP to produce a 30-minute documentary capturing the aftermath of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption in January 2022. This catastrophic event wreaked havoc on Tonga, devastating homes, the environment, and infrastructure, profoundly impacting the lives of its residents. Our documentary provides a poignant narrative, documenting the emotional toll on the local communities and the extensive cleanup and rebuilding efforts that followed. It offers an in-depth look at how Tonga managed its disaster waste, highlighting the coordinated response by various organisations to restore normalcy to the island nation.

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Volcanic ash and waves in Tonga — SPREP documentary on 2022 eruption and tsunami recovery produced by Mude

This is a European Union funded documentary we made for the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environmental Programme (SPREP), about the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption of January 2022 and the disaster waste response that followed.

It runs around half an hour, is built around interviews with people on the ground in Tonga and the people who coordinated the response, and was commissioned as a training reference for government teams, NGOs and emergency services across the Pacific, with the brief that the audience should walk away better prepared for the next disaster of this kind. It premiered at the SPREP workshop in December 2022 and was published to YouTube shortly after.

What happened in Tonga

On the 15th of January 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted with a force that scientists later described as a once-in-a-thousand-year event for this type of volcano. The blast was visible from space, registered around the world, and within about an hour a tsunami had reached Tonga’s main island of Tongatapu. Tonga’s disaster planning was built around tsunamis triggered by earthquakes in the Tonga Trench, which come with warning time, evacuation windows, and a regional seismic signal you can pick up.

The Hunga Tonga eruption produced a tsunami with none of those, and the sequence on the ground collapsed almost into a single moment, with people hearing the eruption, the windows shaking, the sky going black with ash, and the wave arriving. There was no protocol for it because no one had built one, and that doctrinal gap shapes almost every account in the film. Three people died, coastal homes were destroyed, and Tonga’s single underwater fibre optic cable was severed, which cut almost all communication with the outside world.

Volcanic ash covered the country in a layer that one interviewee described as needing fifty sweeps in a single spot just to shift, the airport runway was unusable for a week, and drinking water (around 80 to 90 percent of which comes from rainwater catchment) was contaminated to the point that the tanks had to be cleaned out and left empty until the next rain came. Tongan cemeteries, which sit along the coast, were torn open by the wave, and families collected the remains of their relatives by hand.

The brief

SPREP runs training programmes and workshops on disaster preparedness across Pacific island nations, and they wanted a documentary that would be useful in that context, which meant a film with two jobs to do at once: tell the story of what happened, and make a clear, honest case for what the response got right and what it didn’t. The working title was The Rising Tide: Are we prepared for future disasters? and that question shaped the whole structure.

The specific focus was disaster waste management, which sounds narrow until you start looking at what it actually covers, because waste is the connecting thread between most of the friction points in a disaster like this. Volcanic ash on the runway means aid planes can’t land, ash in the harbour means relief ships can’t dock, asbestos in the debris from damaged buildings becomes a hazard for emergency workers handling the cleanup, and plastic bottles and packaging from incoming aid creates its own waste problem on the way to solving an immediate one.

The brief asked us to draw those connections out clearly so that other Pacific nations watching the film could plan for them in advance rather than improvise around them after the fact.

There was also an unstated requirement that the film not feel like a typical government or NGO production, and SPREP didn’t want a piece that played safe. The tone we agreed on was sleek and honest, willing to be critical where the response had fallen short but never judgemental of the people doing the work, on the basis that the audience for this film is people doing similar work in similar conditions and they would smell a sanitised version immediately.

The project began with a discovery session and a creative brief that worked through the messaging pillars, audience segmentation, perspective mapping for interviewees, and the narrative framework that would carry the film, and from there it moved into pre-production planning before our team flew to Tonga to shoot.

We built the documentary around interviews with people on four sides of the response: the general public who lived through it, the government and emergency services teams who coordinated it, the local NGOs and waste authorities who led the cleanup, and the international partners who arrived with equipment and aid.

The public footage was captured almost entirely on mobile phones, in kitchens and yards in the seconds and minutes after the first explosion, and we spoke to people who described the cleanup of their own homes, the sound of children crying in neighbouring houses, the loss of family graves to the wave, and the role of the church and the community in holding things together when the government systems were overwhelmed.

In a country where most of the population is related to someone in every village, the immediate response to an event like this is everyone trying to find out if their family is alive, and that sequence of the disaster, the part that happens before any coordinated response can begin, only comes through in the interviews.

The government and emergency services interviews ran across the National Emergency Management Office (NEMO), the Tonga Waste Authority, the Tonga Fire and Emergency Services, the Tonga Red Cross Society, and officials from the Tonga Ministry of Meteorology, Energy, Information, Disaster Management, Environment, Climate Change and Communications (MEIDECC), which holds the country’s disaster risk reduction portfolio along with the Tonga Meteorological Services and the Tonga Geological Services that sit under it.

We heard about specific gaps, including a complete absence of equipment appropriate for clearing volcanic ash or bulky tsunami debris, and a doctrine that hadn’t planned for non-seismic tsunamis, and we heard about the manual workarounds that emerged when the digital systems failed, including an operations manager at one of the banks who hand-carried staff salaries to outer island branches on a boat because there was no other way to get them paid.

The Nuku’alofa cleanup was led in large part by local NGOs working with community groups, town officers and church leaders, and one of the more striking numbers from the response is that during the cleanup, an equivalent of three tonnes of compacted plastic litter was collected in two days from across Tongatapu and shipped out of Tonga on the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Canberra.

Landfill input across the January to March period rose by 32 percent, partly from the disaster waste itself and partly from the packaging of incoming aid. On the international side, the Royal Australian Navy and the New Zealand Defence Force arrived with equipment that didn’t exist in Tonga at the time, including the gear required to handle asbestos safely, and foreign aid programmes coordinated through the Australian and New Zealand governments handled the supply of food, water and shelter through the early weeks of the response, with other Pacific nations and NGOs providing technical assistance on wharf clearance, water and sanitation, and waste disposal.

The film opens with the eruption itself, told through the eyes of people who heard it, and moves through the first day (the darkness, the ash, the wave, the confusion about what kind of event was even happening), the early response (the cleanup of the runway and the wharf to allow aid in, the bank operations manager and his boat, the community sweeping the streets), and the longer cleanup that followed.

The middle section is the waste-specific material: the asbestos problem and how it was managed once the Royal Australian Navy and the New Zealand Defence Force arrived with the right kit, the bottleneck at the airport, the ash in the rainwater tanks and the month-long wait for the next rain, the 32 percent landfill spike, the three tonnes of compacted plastic, and the disposal of bulky waste from coastal homes that the government later relocated inland.

The final section is the question SPREP wanted the documentary to land on, which is what Tonga’s response got right, what it got wrong, and what other Pacific nations should take from it. The honest answer the interviewees give is that the response succeeded in spite of significant gaps and that they were fortunate the event was not larger, and Tonga has since installed sirens that are tested every Friday and rebuilt its disaster planning to assume tsunamis can come from anywhere, including from volcanic sources.

There is also a clear case made for more evacuation centres, better disability access in those centres, and a shared disaster waste management plan that government agencies, private contractors and communities can work to before the next event rather than improvise after it.

We produced the film from our studio in Glebe, Sydney, with our team travelling for on-location cinematography in Tonga, and pre-production covered the brief, the narrative framework, perspective mapping for interviewees, location scoping and shoot scheduling.

Most of the interviews were captured outdoors using natural light, in keeping with the boots-on-the-ground visual language we agreed on with SPREP, and the cinematography mixed sit-down interviews with walk-and-talk sequences and B-roll coverage of the locations themselves, including coastal cemeteries, evacuation centres, the wharf, the airport runway and the Tonga Waste Authority’s landfill operations.

Post-production integrated several material sources, including our own cinematography, mobile phone footage captured by Tongans during and after the eruption (the only footage of the actual event available, since no professional crew was there), broadcast material licensed from local Tongan television, and the satellite imagery that allowed the rest of the world to see the scale of the eruption in real time, and the editing, colour grading and sound design were all handled in-house, along with subtitle preparation for international audiences and a final delivery cut sized for the SPREP workshop screen as well as a YouTube master.

The score is understated by design, because the story is doing the heavy lifting and the music’s job is to keep the audience inside the narrative without competing for attention, and the brief on the music called for something multi-genred, drawing on both real and digital instruments, timeless enough that it would not date the film as it moves through SPREP’s training rotation over the coming years. The visual direction avoids the conventions of a typical government training video while keeping the film legible as a serious piece of information for the audience it was built for.

The documentary premiered at the SPREP workshop in December 2022 in front of an audience of Pacific government delegates, regional NGOs and emergency services partners, and was published to the SPREP YouTube channel shortly after, where it now sits in SPREP’s library as a training reference for disaster waste management across the Pacific and as a public record of an event that, on the scientific account, the region will not see again for many lifetimes.