More than 400 pilot whales were stranded in the sand at Farewell Spit at the northern tip of the South Island in New Zealand on Friday, and according to eyewitnesses, many of these stranded whales have now died.
Many conservation workers and volunteers have been trying to keep the creatures alive by sloshing water over their bodies using buckets.
Earlier, Project Jonah issued a Facebook alert about the incident, and as a result, hundreds of people responded to serve as volunteers. The roads to the South Island beach were packed with cars moving towards the remote area.
There are more than 300 volunteers at the scene, assisting conservation workers in saving the whales. Some volunteers formed human chains to prevent whales from swimming back ashore.
“It can be really quite distressing seeing so many dead whales,” Kath Inwood a community ranger at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation told the Times.
“People need to be resilient and handle that and then get on with what needs to be done.”
According to some reports, about three-quarters of the stranded whales have died.
A major setback for the rescuers trying to save the whales came when they saw refloated whales heading back into the beach.
The Department of Conservation Golden Bay operations manager Andrew Lamason revealed that most of the whales that had been rescued were swimming in the wrong direction and coming back into the bay.
According to Lamason, it would be dangerous to try a rescue at night and they will have to wait until tomorrow morning to refloat the whales.
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