“My partner and the truck driver went to try and get the cows off the side of the road and hold them there until the officers got there,” Mottram recalled.
“I went straight over to the driver of the car.”
Emergency services were called to the collision at around 8.30pm. Photo / NZME
Mottram told the Herald the driver – the sole occupant – said he was lightheaded, and Mottram described him as unable to walk properly.
“I did watch him take a couple of pretty good falls.
“I don’t think he would have escaped without some kind of head trauma.”
She immediately called emergency services, but they were already on their way.
“We didn’t know at the time, because we were busy dealing with what was in front of us, that there was another accident further up the road with the same herd of cows.”
Around the same time of the Palmerston North-bound collision, a separate vehicle travelling the opposite way to Ashhurst had collided with cows on the other side of the herd.
“Our driver hit eight of them,” Mottram said. “Three were dead when we arrived, one was actively dying, and ... there were four more that were injured.
“The officers put them down pretty much on the spot. It wasn’t pretty.”
Ten cows were killed on Friday night following a two-vehicle crash on SH3. Photo / NZME
The witness said despite the vehicle damage, there was no indication the driver she helped had lost control of his vehicle.
“We don’t know why [the cows] were on the road. There were no broken fences on the roadside and the farmers couldn’t find anything.”
The injured driver was transported to hospital in an ambulance, while the cows’ bodies were eventually moved off the road and into a truck by an agricultural tractor.
