Safety plea after quad bike fall

Senior Sergeant Greg Brown

A 2-year-old boy has been discharged from hospital after being knocked unconscious in a quad bike incident in Central Hawke's Bay at the weekend.

The incident happened on a coastal property near Clareinch Rd, Omakere, about 8pm on Sunday night.

The boy had regained consciousness when he was flown from Mangakuri Rd to Hawke's Bay Hospital by the Lowe Corporation Rescue Helicopter.

He was transported with a 46-year-old man suffering shoulder injuries, who has since been discharged from hospital.

The boy had also been discharged from hospital yesterday, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The police and the fire service did not attend the incident.

Mangakuri Rd and Clareinch Rd residents contacted by Hawke's Bay Today declined to comment.

In a Waimarama incident in January last year, Ashlee Shorrock, 6, received serious head injuries after she was flung from an overloaded quad bike when it veered off a bank.

Quad bikes are involved in around 28 per cent of all work-related farm deaths and about 850 people are injured riding them on farms every year.

Hawke's Bay road policing Senior Sergeant Greg Brown said Sunday's incident showed quad bike safety needed to be a community-led initiative.

"There are a number of rural and beach communities that use these machines, they're not designed for passengers, but people are still using them as a toy when they're a dangerous piece of machinery," Mr Brown said.

"The reality is the police can't be everywhere, so it needs to be the community, the mums and the dads, to be the first response - to say, actually that's not safe. As this incident shows, [accidents] can happen, and I'm sure these people didn't intend it to happen."

Meanwhile, a Carterton farmer was found lifeless beneath his quad bike in an open drain on Tuesday.

Masterton Police Sergeant Chris Megaw said workmates discovered Hamish McLennan under the machine, hours after the father-of-two was last seen that morning when he set out to spray weeds on his Woodlea dairy-farm property.

Mr Megaw said the 57-year-old farmer had "lost control on the bank of an open drain", toppled in, and was trapped under his machine.

He was unable to be revived.

Police were working alongside his family and Worksafe New Zealand to "reconstruct the events leading up to the incident and establish the cause" of the crash.