Traffic along State Highway 35 near Makorori was disrupted by a large fire at the roadside which nearly encroached on to the road and into nearby bush on Saturday evening.
Bruce Reid was travelling home from a theatre rehearsal in town just after 10pm when he saw flames coming over
the top of the hill slope at the side of the road about a kilometre away from Makorori settlement.
“It was pretty scary. I thought a car had gone over and was on fire,” Reid said.
Reid was the third member of the public to come across the scene and firefighters arrived only minutes after him with two fire trucks and a third smaller one.
He said his video didn’t do justice to the size of the fire because firefighters had gotten it mostly under control at that point and it had looked to him like it was spreading fairly quickly towards nearby native bush before then.
