By CARROLL DU CHATEAU
It was dusk - that magic hour when the light plays tricks, the radio was tuned to 93FM, and the Nga Puhi Iwi social services Hyundai cruising at around 90 just past the Ruakaka turnoff where the roadside ditch is a good three metres deep. And then "right in our face" was the car.
And Tanya and Clarke Hemara, heading out of Whangarei to pick up a child who needed escorting from Auckland Children Youth and Family Services, never stood a chance.
"I remember him coming towards us on the wrong side of the road," says Tanya slowly a few weeks after the accident when her eyelid still couldn't close properly. "It was a four wheel drive and he's coming..."
Then the blackness. Tanya doesn't remember being hauled from the burning wreck by two nurses - Bronwyn from Auckland and Rosemary from Whangarei - and dragged clear. Instead she woke up in the helicopter, asking them to ring her husband and tell him she was OK. It wasn't until late in the evening, after the trauma team at Whangarei had treated her for shock, concussion, cracked ribs, a badly cut face and burns to her hand and back and he still hadn't arrived in the acute ward that she finally "clicked": Clarke, her husband of just two years, wasn't coming back. She attended his tangi - "the biggest-ever" at Pehiaweri marae - in a wheelchair.
Tanya and Clarke Hemara's crash was one of four during a month of autumn horror. In late March two crashes produced seven deaths. As the April showers began, four more deaths.
In all there have been 42 fatals, 21 of them between Waipu and Oakleigh (16 and a half kilometres) over the last five years.
Why so many? Insists Inspector Rex Knight of Operations and Strategic Traffic: "It's not the road. The road's fine. It's a combination of things - in the main driver frustration, limited opportunities to pass...if you need to take evasive action there's no-where to go."
Mostly though, locals put the carnage down to a peculiarly North Auckland phenomenon. When drivers hit the summit of the Brynderwyn ranges and the Ruakaka flats roll out out before them like a lumpy ocean-fringed bowling green with Whangarei city a speck on the horizon, they think they're home. This is Nga Puhi country - a wide sweep of land where the living is more laid back than in Auckland, where many of them learned to skid their old bombs on the back country metal roads, where Marsden Point, that great monument to petrol consumption, flames day and night - and where a man feels free.
What they tend to forget is that the 40 kilometres of road to Whangarei has no passing lanes for 30 kilometres at a stretch; that it is boardered by deep treacherous ditches on both sides; the trucks come thick and fast; it is almost impossible to judge how far away a car coming out of summer shimmer really is; little bumps mean oncoming cars can be half concealed. And people kill themselves and each other in such great numbers this stretch of uneventful road is locally known as the killing fields.
Like Leo Tolstoy's unhappy family, every accident is tragic in its own way. Tanya and Clarke's crash was caused when David Chan of Waipapa, pulled out without noticing the Hyundai coming towards him.
Another crash was caused by a van swerving off the road at four in the morning and hitting a tree. The 15-year-old driver who had, presumably driven all the way from Auckland, was unlicensed. All three passengers lying asleep in the back of the van without seatbelts, were killed.
Notes Knight, "In a significant number of cases the non-wearing of seatbelts was a factor." And "significantly, they were locals".
To be a local in this part of the country, often means you drive an old, rusted and badly-maintained car, your kids regularly drive you home from the pub or a party - or you drive yourself even while disqualified. Despite the quality of the cars, people are keen on speed. The week before I arrive in Whangarei one driver was clocked at 168kph and another at 157. Many people don't bother, or can't afford, a drivers' license, let alone a Warrent of Fitness or Registration. And if the authorities attempt to force them to comply, they simply abandon the car.
Explains Knight, "last year, when the Land Transport Safety Authority gave us the power... we impounded 500 cars that hadn't been registered or didn't have current Warrents of Fitness. Half of those vehicles still haven't been claimed."
A walk down a Whangarei street next morning reveals that Knight could confiscate more cars if his 12-strong staff had a mind to. A drive through town produced the worst case of road rage I've ever encountered. The man, annoyed at my momentary hesitation at a roundabout jabbed his middle finger at me, then drove off, tyres smoking, gesturing wildly and talking to himself.
Robyn Williams, who worked as a trauma nurse at Whangarei Hospital before moving to Auckland, is convinced that Whangarei drivers are more aggressive. "I was really worried about driving in Auckland," she says, "But down here people let you in when you signal to change lanes. In Whangarei they appear to speed up to block the gap."
Although Bill Rossiter Northland Road Safety Co-Ordinator estimates there are over 4000 people in Northland driving without licences, he insists the real problem is qualified drivers speeding and doing "silly" overtaking movements. "It's impatience," he sighs."Instant coffee, instant tea, instant sex - and I want to get there now!"
Explains Rossiter, a former traffic officer who works in a small room behind the garage of his pleasant Whangarei home, all but three of the recent fatals were local.
Northlanders, on the other hand, are convinced that crash problems are caused by two things - holidaying Aucklanders and convoys of camper vans. Says Rossiter, "It's a denial thing. Local people absolutely deny it's their fault...But this is not a killer highway, it's drivers killing other people."
Certainly with this stretch of road clocking 7000 vehicles a day - up from 4500 in 1994 - is starved of passing opportunities. And as anyone who has sat behind a driver who saunters along at 80 kilometres on the open road knows, being prevented from passing is infuriating.
No matter how often Rex Knight might tell people that the difference between 80 and 100 kilometres on the Auckland-Whangarei trip is eight minutes, people still want to get there faster.
Tow truck driver Andrew Macdonald, and service station manager Theo Wortelboer, talk about the horrors of living close to the killing fields where the wail of the siren fills the community with dread. Says Wortelboer, "People pass on double yellow lines just before corners...others sit on 90 and end up with 20 cars behind them, until some guy decides to take everyone at once."
First on the scene are often the fire engines who in this part of the world spend half their callouts on road accidents. "When your pager goes you're prepared for the worst - and they usually are," says Stu Pearson who's been working for local fire services for 12 years.
First priority is to get people out, cutting vehicles open with the jaws of life "a big pair of tin snips" then hauling the gaps open with spreaders. "We deal with the guys who're given most priority...work on that golden hour between the time of the crash and getting them to hospital," says Pearson. "The dead ones we forget about - we put them aside with a blanket over them."
The other night Pearson, who lives at One Tree Point, lay in bed and counted the people killed in accidents he's attended over the past five years. "There were 40". He deals with the horror by turning off mentally, especially if children are involved, laughing and joking, even at the scene - "otherwise we'd go nuts". And, at the end of the shift, especially a gruesome one, the crew sit round with a few beers until they calm down.
Most times, a serious crash on the Ruakaka straights means a helicopter if they're to make the golden hour. Crashes nearer town are handled by ambulance.
For Robyn Williams, the deafening throb of a helicopter overhead means trouble. By then the unit has had a call on the RT and are prepared. An orderly and nurse rush to to the helipad on the roof and bring down the casualties. And the team swings into action.
Says Williams, "There's a huge impact on the hospital - not just the emergency department. We often have to get extra staff to handle the two or three ambulances and helicopter. The theatres have to be empty to cope with them, so routine operations have to be put off. Some with breaks get put into back slabs and have to wait for theatre next day. Others get put down the list. They just have to wait."
The hardest situations of all, says Williams, is when you know someone involved in a crash. And in a small city like Whangarei, that happens reasonably often. "You just put on your professional coat and do your job."
Although the crash rate is sporadic, it is getting worse. Five fatal crashes in 1999, 11 in the first five months of 2000. However, the men who meet regularly to assess the situation and make recommendations to Transit and the LTSA - Rossiter, Knight and Transit Network Engineer for Northland Richard Green - are determined this is a driver, rather than a road, problem.
Says Rossiter: "I've got no sympathy now. People have got to drive with some responsibility ... We've achieved a huge community shift in the last 10 years in relation to drink/driving. We need to see the same shift in the wearing of seatbelts - compliance is very poor- and with speed."
This Easter the team proved the point by mocking up a crash - complete with wrecked car, ambulance, flashing lights and free biscuits, and coffee for tired drivers - near the Ruakaka turnoff. Result: no crashes.
Physical improvements are, however, slow coming. Skid surfacing - which just about everyone reckons has not been a core factor in the recent spate of crashes - is being laid in some hotspots this year. Passing lanes will be tacked on by 2000 - well after a 20,000 sqm Carter Holt Harvey laminated veneer factory at Ruakaka and a $150 million 500 acre waterway subdivision at One Tree Point, push up traffic rates.
Why will modifications take so long? "It's really only this year that high accident rates have brought this [passing lanes] into consideration," says Green. "We've always felt it was a straight, reasonably wide and relatively flat road - not one we'd run out and put passing lanes on."
Green explains that road modifications "depend on a cost/benefit analysis which balance the cost of accidents against the cost of modifications. A human life is valued at around $3 million and passing lanes are costed out on the same formula as roads - around $300,000 per kilometre. This means that a typical 500 to 700-metre lane would cost somewhere around $150,000-$200,000 and, on face value, only a quarter of the cost of a life.
The notorious stretch of road through Merermere en route to Hamilton, with a traffic rate of between 16,000-18,000 a day (compared with 7000 for Ruakaka) is now four lane to Mercer, double-yellow lined through the bends, then laced with passing lanes in both directions. Result? Over the past five years, says Rossiter, 21 fatalities over the stretch equivalent to Waipu-Oakleigh which itself scored 25.
Then there are cultural changes which may, just may, help Northanders improve their driving. Robyn Williams suggests that driving is taught - and licences obtained - through schools. "It would be far more controlled. Why doesn't school teach them something worthwhile such as defensive driving?"
Bill Rossiter talks about marae-based driver training through which they've licensed 2400, mostly adult drivers, since '95 - so bringing them into the system. "I'd like everyone 20 ks over the speed limit to go through a retraining course," he continues. "We also need more 'road rule' type TV ads - intersection rules, railway crossing rules, winter driving techniques..."
Next month Rossiter and Knight will ratchet up their offensive several steps are putting together a campaign to hit Northlanders in their pockets. "For the month of August we'll have a policeman on the road 24 hours a day," says Rossiter. "Everyone over the speed limit will be stopped and anyone 10 kilometres and over will be ticketed."
As he said earlier, "out on the road it's a war zone. If we had as many soldiers killed overseas people would scream blue bloody murder...Somehow it's got to be stopped."
For Tanya Hemara, who is still only able to work 10 hours a week, after two months of pain, doctors, physiotherapy to correct a shattered finger, two upset teenagers and a yawning space in the bed, the new measures are too late.
With her "best friend," white cat Snowball, she's kept herself busy gardening, trying to finish projects she and Clarke started. "I only buy the plants he likes — subtropical grasses, succulents, cacti."
Apart from a visit with local kaumatua to bless the crash site, she hasn't found the courage to tackle the killing fields again — even to get to touch rugby or Auckland. "I'm dreading the time I have to pass that accident site."
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