LEAD STORY: Horror day on BAy roads

A child and two young adults are dead and 11 others injured after two crashes yesterday. It was the worse start to a New Year on roads in the Napier and Hastings area in at least three decades.
The crashes, 4 1/2 hours apart on rural roads near Hastings, brought the New Year toll in the area to four in 14 days.
The Ministry of Transport said theprevious highest toll in the twin-city districts in the first fortnight in January in the last 30 years had been three, most recently in 1998.
Today there were fears the toll would rise with many of those in hospital reported critically or seriously ill.
The first tragedy occured when a truck hit a car just after 12.15pm on Longlands Rd, east of the Riverslea Rd intersection, killing the woman driver and a 5-year-old boy in the back seat.
A man, 19, an infant and another child were rushed to hospital critically ill.
The third death was that of a 20-year-old man flown to hospital by helicopter after a van carrying eight Vietnamese vineyard workers rolled on Kereru Rd, about 400m east of the Mangatahi and Aorangi roads intersection about 5.45pm.
Names had not been released this morning but those in the white Mitsubishi in the Longlands crash were understood to be from Central Hawke's Bay.
Firefighters cut the roof from the crushed white Mitsubishi Lancer to remove the critically-injured man and two young children who were then rushed to Hawke's Bay Hospital by St John ambulances, one driven by a police constable as the medical staff treated a patient in the rear of the vehicle.
The driver of the west-bound Farmers Transport Volvo truck, who had braked heavily in an attempt to avoid the car as it either came out of a driveway or turned across the road, was not injured. He was assisted by Victim Support volunteers at the scene after being interviewed briefly by police.
The fire service and police, called by cellphone, initially had difficulty finding the crash and were on Maraekakaho Rd heading towards Bridge Pa when they were turned around by police, who had also been heading in the wrong direction.
At the time of the tragedy, police serious crash investigators were back at the scene of the only previous road fatality in Hawke's Bay of the new year, in which a man, 64, died after the car he was driving veered off State Highway 2 and hit a tree between Napier and Awatoto on January 6.
Four ambulances rushed to the second crash, and following the death of the 20-year-old today, three men and four women, thought to be aged from the early 20s to 45, remained in Hawke's Bay Hospital.
No other vehicles were involved in the crash which happened on a bend as the workers, understood to be mainly one family, headed home to their accommodation in Hastings.
The road and weather conditions at both crash scenes were good, police said.