'I heard the kids screaming'

The Subaru is loaded on to a towtruck after missing a corner and smashing into the schoolbus. Photo / Richard Robinson

A young man is dead after his car crossed the centre line and was partially crushed under a school bus carrying 21 teenagers.

Two other occupants of the car were last night in a serious condition in Auckland City Hospital.

The crash happened about 4.10pm yesterday on Old North Rd, Kumeu, at a "treacherous" corner where other lives have been lost.

Resident Karl Trautvetter, 21, said the collision sounded like a tonne of bricks being dropped on to a sheet of metal. "It was just like a really loud metal bang noise."

He ran from his house, which is almost directly outside the crash scene.

At first, he thought the car was on fire because smoke was coming from it and he could smell burning oil.

"I heard the kids screaming and crying ... The guys in the car were moaning and swearing and going in and out of consciousness.

"The car was pretty much crumpled up to the windscreen, it was all mashed. The front of the bus was all smashed too."

The car, a Subaru WRX, collided with the bus carrying 21 junior students from four North Shore secondary schools - Rosmini College, Westlake Girls, Westlake Boys and Carmel College.

The female bus driver - calm but in shock - was trying to get the driver's door open.

"She was trying to help the guys in the car out, checking to see if the kids were okay," said Mr Trautvetter.

PBC Party Bus Company operations manager Dave Curgenven said last night that the experienced bus driver would be offered counselling.

Three Rosmini College boys helped the driver to give first-aid to the victims, he said.

Apart from some knocked heads and bruised knees, none of the students was injured.

Mr Trautvetter said police took students down the road away from the crash scene because the injured men were in a bad way and the driver had fallen from the car.

"The people who were trying to do first aid managed to get the door open ... He was a really big guy and he fell out."

He told the Herald many of the teenagers called their parents from mobile phones to say they were all right and to arrange to be picked up.

"They were pretty distressed," Mr Trautvetter said.

Firefighters had to cut the injured men - one in the passenger seat and one in the back - from the car.

"They looked pretty bad," Mr Trautvetter said.

He thought all the men were aged in their 20s, and said they had been wearing seat-belts. A passer-by who knew first-aid was talking to the victims and holding their necks up.

The corner was a problem area for crashes.

"There are quite often crashes here, pretty much when it rains, really. It's quite common," Mr Trautvetter said.

In 1999, a motorcyclist was killed when he came off his bike and was run over by a car, and there had been at least one other fatality.

Rodney Local Board chairman Bob Howard, who lives on Old North Rd, said the corner was sharp, and in wet weather people "just spin out and get on the other side. It's unfortunate the bus was coming on the other side."

Mr Howard said he saw a crash there five weeks ago when a car following him spun out and crashed into trees.

His wife, Christine Howard, said: "It is a treacherous corner. Many accidents have happened there before. Cars just speed around that corner."

Acting Sergeant Colin Nuttall, of the Waitemata police serious crash unit, said it wasn't clear why the Subaru crossed the centre line.

The roads were wet and that could have been a factor, although it had not been raining when emergency services arrived.

Carmel College principal Kath Deady said she expected the students on the bus would be traumatised.

"We had an incident about a year ago where a cyclist was knocked off a bike by a school bus and injured. The girls were very upset by that, so I imagine this will be much worse because someone died."