The impact of fatal crashes on first responders is being recognised by a group that aims to support serving and retired ambulance officers who “cannot unsee what we have seen“. Doug Laing talks to one of the group’s founders and takes a look at this year’s road toll statistics.
News of any fatal crash still invokes flashbacks and nightmares among those who have had to deal with the tragedies, including former Hawke’s Bay ambulance officer Murray Waite.
Waite worked through the 1970s, when the annual toll rose to the all-time record 843 in 1973 – 273 more than the record had been just three years earlier at the end of the 1960s.
He was with the St John Ambulance Service in Hastings in 1972-1976, and later became Chief Ambulance Officer for Dunedin, leading the establishment of the Otago Regional Ambulance Service, the first regional structure in the service.
Despite having lived on the Gold Coast in Australia for the past 36 years, most of it as a commercial photographer, he has been instrumental in the past two years in establishing the New Zealand Association of Ambulance Veterans, of which he is the founding secretary/treasurer.
Waite said it started with he and two other retired officers forming an “informal association” to provide a platform for “discussion and collegial interaction” and ensure the protection of an accurate history of New Zealand ambulance services.
But the Facebook collective revealed a “real and urgent need” for a formal body representing still-serving and retired officers, particularly those still suffering from the impacts of what they had seen on the job, and a trust was established in July 2024,
“One of the most significant and pressing needs is to provide support for ailing veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a litany of psychological and physical disabilities as a result of having served many decades in frontline service, dealing with a multiplicity of tragedies, trauma and human suffering almost on a weekly basis.”
“These people truly are veterans of long and intense emergency care service to the New Zealand community,” he said.
Waite said ambulance services in New Zealand had always been “the poor relation” of the three emergency services (police, fire and ambulance).
“The historical base from which the two contracted providers (St John and Wellington Free Ambulance) have come from has resulted in very little or practically no formal or informal support, even for paid professional staff, but, significantly, pretty well none at all for the huge number of volunteer ambulance workers,” he said.
Among many he recalled was a crash involving a car and a train on a crossing on Ruahapia Rd, near Whakatu, in 1974, resulting in three deaths.
He was on his own – “for the first 20 minutes” – as the first emergency service responder: “That was the brutal reality of the time.”
“I’ve never suffered any PTSD from my career time, but plenty have,” he says.
A trust has been formed, with a mission to support the care and wellbeing of “colleagues”, and a brochure prepared for the support campaign includes a photo with Waite at the 1974 crash scene and the message: “We cannot unsee what we have seen.”
An overnight crash near Havelock North resulted in the 13th death in the national Christmas-New Year holiday road toll.
Police were called just before 10pm on Thursday to Foster Lane, off Endsleigh Drive in a new housing area in the hilly southern rural outskirts of Havelock North, where a car had left the road and gone down a bank into a gully.
One person died and two others were seriously injured, police said, but no other details are yet available.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand reported two crews from Hastings and one from the Havelock North Volunteer Fire Brigade took part in the rescue of three people trapped in the vehicle about 20m down the bank from the road.
The Serious Crash Unit had examined the scene and inquiries into the circumstances of the crash were ongoing.
It was the second fatality on Hawke’s Bay roads in the police and Ministry of Transport Christmas New Year holiday road toll period that started at 4pm on December 24 and ended at 6am on January 3, the first being that of a man who fell from a vehicle in Nuffield Ave, Marewa, Napier, on the night of December 27.
The holiday toll was 13 according to provisional statistics, the lowest since the 11 in the 2020-2021 holiday period, and well down on the 22 recorded in last year’s Christmas-New Year holiday season. During last October’s three-day 2024 Labour Day holiday weekend there were no fatalities.
The national toll for 2024, also provisionally, was 289 – 52 less than in 2023 and the lowest since the 253 recorded in 2013, which is the lowest in the 74 years since 236 died in 1950.
But the new year is off to a bad start with five fatalities in the first 48 hours of 2025, one more than in the first two days in 2024 and continuing a trend in recent years.
The provisional statistics show there were 15 deaths on roads last year in the Hawke’s Bay area from Wairoa to Tararua, with six by mid-February being among nine in nine weeks.
There were 18 in the area in 2023, 17 in 2022 and 10 in 2021. The six in 2013 is thought to be the lowest for the area in more than 60 years.
There were six fatalities in the Napier area last year and six in the Hastings District, which extends to the northwest on State Highway 5 towards Taupō and the north on State Highway 2 towards Wairoa. The highest in any of the five local authority districts in the past 35 years was 26 in the Hastings District in 1990 when there were 55 deaths throughout the Bay.
Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 51 years of journalism experience, 41 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.
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