Jacknifed trailer spills beans on Napier Taupo Rd

A trail of baked beans and beetroot greeted motorists heading towards Taupo on State Highway 5 yesterday after the latest of a series of truck crashes on Hawke's Bay roads.
Just north of Tarawera (80km from Napier) a northbound truck and trailer laden with about 10 tonnes of canned food crossed the highway rounding a downhill bend just after 10am. The trailer jacknifed, flipped and was dragged on its side for more than 20m.
The truck and trailer blocked the road to all traffic for about an hour, and Sergeant Geoff Strother, of the Napier Police Road Policing Branch, said traffic was then restricted to one lane for several hours before the scene was cleared about 3pm.
The 39-year-old truck driver and his male passenger, both from Auckland, were not injured and only police and a salvage crew from Taupo attended.
The truck was not badly damaged, but the trailer was extensively damaged, although most of its load of eight pellets of canned goods remained intact.
But it could have been much worse, according to a motorist who arrived soon afterwards.
"The driver is very lucky - another metre or two to the right and he would have been over the edge, about a 30m drop," said Phil Newman, of Tauranga.
A driver who had been following the truck had told him it happened at a speed of 30-40km/h and it appeared as if the load had shifted on the trailer.
It was at least the third truck crash in Hawke's Bay in five days.
On Thursday a logging truck trailer collided with an oncoming vehicle on State Highway 5 at Eskdale, and on Friday an unladen logging truck left State Highway 2 and crashed into a culvert near Tutira.