Map mix-up led to delays at Onehunga crash site

Raymond Tuporo died in a car crash in which live wires obstructed rescuers for more than two and a half hours. Photo / Facebook

Coroner hears crash victim died after engineer spent hour looking for substation

An electrical engineer tasked with cutting power to a crash site where a man lay trapped inside his car, surrounded by power lines, did not call an operations centre for help despite being unable to find a substation for about an hour.

Raymond Riripi Tuporo's silver Mitsubishi Lancer smashed into a concrete power pole in Onehunga, Auckland, as he was driving home from a party in the early hours of September 2, 2012.

The 26-year-old died almost three hours later, trapped inside the car, as emergency services watched, unable to reach him as he was surrounded by thick electrical cables.

An inquest into Mr Tuporo's death resumed before Coroner Morag McDowell yesterday.

The hearing was told that a Northpower electrical engineer, who has interim name suppression, did not tell the Vector operations centre he could not access an online aerial map, known as a GIS map, after the internet on his tablet computer cut out. The map shows the location of substations and switches, and would have given him the address of the appropriate substation.

Instead, the engineer used a hard-copy map, which showed the high voltage lines in the area, to get a rough location for the substation.

He spent an hour walking around Onehunga, trying to find the substation, before an operator at the Vector operations centre phoned him with a street number and directions.

He eventually found the substation down a long alleyway at the back of a building, and cut power to the high voltage lines on Neilson St - a procedure which took minutes - where Mr Tuporo had crashed about two hours earlier.

Isolating power to other lines and street lights in the area, and earthing the high voltage cables, took another 30 to 60 minutes, by which time Mr Tuporo was dead.

An earlier inquest hearing in June heard how Mr Tuporo, known as Ray, had been travelling at about 120km/h in a 50km/h zone, and had a blood alcohol level of more than twice the then legal limit, when he crashed.

The engineer described how at the crash scene the power pole had been ripped out of the ground, pulling underground electrical cables on to the driver's side of the crash site, and overhead wires around the car.

However, when he went to look for the local substation, his tablet would not load the GIS map, telling him "the webpage is not found".

Asked why he did not immediately tell the Vector operator, or ask the operator to access the GIS from the control centre to find the address, he said the operator "doesn't know we have got tablets, we never told them". He also said he had relayed to the operator the difficulty in finding an exact location.

Earlier at yesterday's hearing, Onehunga Fire Service senior station officer John Roberts, who was in charge of the scene, described how he asked the Northpower engineer to "kill the power to a larger area as a matter of urgency", because "something needed to be done".

However, counsel for Northpower, Brian Dickey said it was not possible to cut power to an entire suburb.