Police on Masters Rd in Waiuku on Tuesday night. Photo: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
A rural South Auckland resident nearby the scene of a triple-fatal crash has described coming across the aftermath at the end of his driveway.
A woman and two children died when their car left the road and ended up in a body of water near Waiuku on Tuesday afternoon.
Emergency services were called to Masters Road at 3.30pm.
Nearby resident Billy McLean, was first on the scene, and told Morning Report he was in his shed when he heard the crash.
He went down his driveway in a hurry to see what happened.
"I picked up the sound of a car horn still on, but it was very... sounded like it was far away," McLean said.
The crash occurred on Masters Rd in Waiuku. Photo: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
"But I knew it was close... I run down to the end of my driveway and found that that horn was attached to a car, of course, but that horn was submerged probably four feet in mud, upside down, the whole car was upside down."
The car had crashed into a wetland area, he said.
McLean said he tried to get into the water to help.
"I know that it's not much water, it's more mud," McLean said.
"There's not a hundred gorillas that could have torn that door off."
The area was no stranger to serious crashes, he said.
"I've lived on this road for a few years, and there has been some pretty horrendous high speed accidents here.
A police car guarding the scene on Tuesday night. Photo: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
"If anyone's ever heard that sound, it kind of sounds like a truck exploding, when there's a really high impact, high speed crash."
McLean said the sound of Tuesday's crash was nothing like that, and was quite subtle.
"It was a strange noise that made me think 'what the hell was that'," he said.
He said there were a combination of elements that made up the road, known locally as The Cuttings or the Rollercoaster Road.
"It's not a wide road for a start, I mean this is a rural road, it's quite narrow for the machines, the farm equipment that is ferried up and down these roads on a daily basis."
There had been many times where he'd had to pull off the road and almost come to a stop to allow larger farm equipment to pass, McLean said.
"Looking at what's left at the end of my driveway there, and having dealt with accidents many times, this one doesn't look like it was speed here."
He believed something could have put the vehicle slightly off the road.
"These big pine trees on the other side of the road here shelter all the sun all day, so there's just thick moss growing right in the pit, right in the guts of this big steep, dangerous hill," McLean said.
"It could have been a minor adjustment, and she's hit that slippery moss, gone into the water table, hit the culvert in my driveway and just sent her into the drain."
"You can't get out of that water table, once you're in that gravel, you can't get out, especially on the angle of this place here."
McLean said something should have been done about the road years ago.
He said there were three or four safety cameras in the area but they were all placed in what he called non-fatal downhill areas, "right where they can snap you and get your revenue off you".
"How about you move one of those cameras right to the brow of this hill here, where people are regularly dying, and you can actually actively save lives.
"That would slow people down, for a start, and that would give a little bit of time of maybe, I don't know, three or four lives saved until this road is actually planned and laid a bit better."
The road needed to be wider and cleaner, McLean said.
He suggested getting rid of the cutting in the hill and making it instead go straight down, flatten, and back up again.
"I know it would be hugely expensive," he said.
"But, you know, what are lives worth?"
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
