Deaths blamed on truck speed

TAURANGA - More than one logging truck rolls over on New Zealand roads a week, the Tauranga District Court has been told during a prosecution resulting from the deaths of four Auckland women near Katikati a year ago.

A Rotorua truck driver, John Earle Branson, 55, has pleaded not guilty to four charges of careless driving causing death and two charges of careless driving causing injury.

The prosecution alleges he was speeding when his fully laden Rotorua Forest Haulage Ltd B-train rig (a tractor unit towing two trailers) rolled on a gentle lefthand curve on State Highway 2 at Apata, north of Tauranga, on May 25 last year.

Falling logs crushed an on-coming car containing old school friends in their late 60s, Joyce Corless, Meryl Spencer, Patricia Towers and Patricia Audain, who were returning to Auckland. Two Waihi men in a second vehicle suffered minor injuries.

The hearing, before Judge Geoff Ellis, goes into its third day today.

A police expert witness, research engineer Douglas Latto, told the court on Monday that the B-train would roll on that particular road bend at between 100 and 105 km/h.

The maximum allowable speed for such vehicles is 90 km/h.

One of the exhibits produced is a report by Mr Latto and colleague Peter Baas which says the primary cause of the crash was excessive speed, with the main contributing factor being the poor inherent stability of the rig.

In an investigation commissioned by the Land Transport Safety Authority, the pair said nearly 30 per cent of trucks had been found to exceed 100 km/h during speed surveys.

Research undertaken in 1997 conservatively estimated that more than 60 logging trucks a year overturned. The national fleet is 650.

Branson, now unemployed, said he had been a truck driver for 35 years and had been driving the rig he was in on the day of the accident for six to eight months.

He got up about 4 am to start work in Rotorua an hour later and had travelled that day to Te Kuiti, Kawhia, Pokeno and Hunua before heading to Tauranga with a load of logs.

The accident happened when he had been awake more than 13 hours.

The defendant said he had no reason to hurry and was not speeding. A speed governor on the truck meant the fastest it would reach was 100 - or 103 km/h going downhill.

Branson told prosecutor Sergeant Keith Elliott he had travelled the section of road where the crash happened hundreds of times.

A mechanical defect had been ruled out as the cause and he did not know why the vehicle had rolled.

He did not accept the evidence of witnesses who said the rear trailer wheels had lifted from the ground while he was travelling around lefthand curves.

Defence witnesses described Branson as a safe, steady driver.

The judge is expected to reserve his decision when the hearing winds up today.