On the night before a fatal school caving trip, MetService escalated its weather warning to severe and parents fired off urgent emails to the school. But their concerns carried no weight and the excursion went ahead, with fatal consequences. As week two of the inquest into the death of 15‑year‑old Karnin Petera opened, the staff who made those decisions began giving evidence, including one who admitted he was looking at other data and not the alerts. “I should have paid more attention to other things than the things I did pay attention to,” said a male Whangārei Boys’ High staff member, who has name suppression. The inquest, conducted by Coroner Alexander Ho in the Whangārei District Court, is examining how the risks of the excursion were identified, assessed and managed, before the trip and once the group was inside the caves. Other focuses will be on adequate information about the dangers of entering the caves and where the responsibility lies to update weather information.…