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Home / New Zealand

Live wire fatal: Mother haunted by death

Patrice Dougan
By Patrice Dougan
Assistant Chief of Staff·NZME.·
18 Dec, 2014 05:37 AM5 mins to read

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Raymond Tuporo died in a car crash in which live wires obstructed rescuers for more than two and a half hours. Photo / Facebook

Raymond Tuporo died in a car crash in which live wires obstructed rescuers for more than two and a half hours. Photo / Facebook

The heartbroken mother of an Auckland man who died in a car crash while emergency services waited for power lines to be switched off says she lies awake at night visualising his painful death as he watched the "helpless" paramedics looking on.

In a heartwrenching statement at the closing of the inquest into the death of Raymond Riripi Tuporo, 26, his mother Glenda Olsen broke down in tears as she spoke of "a lot of mistakes" which contributed to his death.

"As far as I'm concerned, there is no one to blame for his accident except himself. He made a very bad mistake. We have to accept that," she said.

Ms Olsen was referring to her son's decision to drive home from a party in the early hours of September 2, 2012, with more than twice the then legal blood alcohol limit in his system.

He was also found to have been travelling at a speed of about 120km/h in a 50km/h zone when he crashed into a concrete power pole on Neilson St in Onehunga around 2.15am, bringing the overhead cables falling down around him.

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"But what I can't accept, is that there were a lot of mistakes made that night and we are trying to handle all of this, but I go to bed visualising my son lying at the back of his car looking at ambulance, fire people who were helpless," she said.

"He lay there for three hours, bleeding. I visualise that at night as I try to get to sleep."

She said "very precious moments of my son's life" were lost as Northpower engineers first spent an hour trying to locate an electrical substation to switch off power to the high voltage cables surrounding his car, and then another hour cutting power to the low voltage cables and street lights at the scene before paramedics were allowed to approach him.

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It was 5am before ambulance staff could properly assess Mr Tuporo, known as Ray, by which stage he was already dead.

Ms Olsen said she accepted her son may not have survived the crash if he had been reached earlier, but it may have given the family a chance to visit him in hospital before he died.

"We didn't get that chance," she said.

"We didn't even know about his death until 8.30am."

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She also revealed she felt forced to move out of her home, because she "couldn't stand" the last memories of her son walking with her out the door.

"I just feel so helpless, but looking at all of this and hearing all of this, [it's clear] there were a lot of mistakes made, and as far as I'm concerned that's not good enough," she told Coroner Morag McDowell.

"[But] I'm really grateful that you're doing this so no other mother has to go through the torment, the pain, the heartache that I've had to go through."

Earlier in the day, Coroner McDowell was told how it was a rare and unusual situation for emergency services and electricity authorities to deal with.

Ms Olsen said that while that may be the case, "there still should have been more in place" to deal with such an incident.

"No one even thought that kind of thing could happen," she said.

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Ms Olsen also said: "This [crash] made a lot of people here do upgrades which should have been done long ago."

The Fire Service, Vector and Northpower all described the crash as one they had never encountered before or since.

"In 30 years I can't recall such a complicated incident," said Minoru Frederiksens, Vector's group general manager service delivery.

"I don't think there was any thought of this kind of incident arising so there was't any thought process around it."

Delivering a joint report carried out by Vector and Northpower for the inquest, Mr Frederiksens and Lloyd Richards, general manager of New Zealand business at Northpower, said they had since been monitoring every vehicle crash which involved a Vector electrical asset.

About 350 incidents a year involved a car crashing into a power pole.

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"Car v pole incidents are not unusual, but in the vast majority of cases it's really straight forward to isolate the power," Mr Richards said.

"It's unusual for a car v pole incident to result in a person being trapped in the car, in most cases the person can walk away or the vehicle will come to a stop away from the pole."

Richard Twomey, the Fire Service's acting area commander for Auckland, said Mr Tuporo's crash was "a situation we've never had before", and the organisation did not have any formal procedures in place at that time to deal with it.

Both services have since worked together to develop formal policies and procedures, including a hotline into the Vector operations centre to prioritise Fire Service incidents.

Vector has also trained its staff to pro-actively inquire whether there are people injured or trapped in car v pole incidents.

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