Woman stranded for 15 hours in car wreck after crashing down Northland bank

A Whangārei woman was left stranded for 15 hours after her car crashed off a road with no cellphone service in Northland. Photo / 1News

A woman was stranded for 15 hours in her wrecked car after crashing off a bank on State Highway 1, at Mangamuka Gorge in Northland.

The area has no cellphone coverage and no passing traffic, 1News reported, leaving the woman stranded until she was found by roading contractors this morning.

The Herald understands the woman is from Whangārei and has family in Kaitaia.

St John was notified of the crash at 9.43am and airlifted one person to Northland Base Hospital with serious injuries.

The section of the highway was closed because of a slip from heavy rain in July. Cracks appear to extend across the entire width of the road.

Video footage from 1News shows a guide rail along the road mangled and bent out of shape by the slip.

Some cracks on the road appeared to be about 40cm wide. Slips can be seen above the road and extending below into the gorge.

Ross Beddows, of the Kaitaia Fire Brigade, told 1News: "As far as we know the lady who was driving the car has left the road here sometime yesterday evening."

Far North deputy mayor Ann Court also told 1News: "It's not until you stand here and get sense of the scale and the sheer number of slips and fractures in the network that you start to realise what a big job we've got ahead of us."

Court added: "The future is not going to be just fixing this road, it can't be, the future has to be looking at alternate routes. We know this road will fail again and again, no matter how much money we throw at it."

One contractor told 1News they were dealing with a number of slips which were not easy to repair.

"They're quite an engineering challenge to try and resolve," he said.

1News reported geotechnical engineers were using live sensors to measure the movement of the slips. Some were still moving up to 2m horizontally at a time.

Data on the ground movement could be combined with the rainfall gauge to understand why the ground was still moving.

The Herald has approached police for comment.