Warning: Graphic details

It was a spectacle that stunned motorists travelling north on the Waikato Expressway - an SUV “screaming past” between the left lane and the wire barrier, an eventual crash and the driver’s inexplicable decision to run into southbound lanes, where he was struck by another vehicle and died at the scene despite the desperate CPR efforts of passersby and first responders.

But the dramatic scenes near Hampton Downs nine days ago weren’t a surprise to everyone. Truckies see appalling driving every day, and are often first on the scene to clean up the mess. One tells Cherie Howie “It never gets better helping emergency services pull bodies out of wreckage.”

It’s the warmth you remember in the weeks, months and even years after pulling a body out of a crashed vehicle, a veteran truckie says.

He’s been at the wheel of truck and trailer units for more than 40 years, and says he sees crashes on our roads every couple of days, including a dozen really bad ones that took lives.

Sometimes he’s driving past an earlier crash, sometimes he arrives moments after, and sometimes the horror unfolds right in front of his windscreen, leaving him to give immediate first aid and comfort, or - sometimes - help first responders remove the dead.

“The thing you realise when you pull a body out of a car crash is that it’s still warm. It’s quite horrible because the first time you do it, it’s still limp and warm.

“Yeah, they’ve died. But they’re warm when you’re pulling them out, giving the ambulance guys a hand. And then sometimes you just put them straight on the ground, they don’t even go into a [stretcher] bed or anything.”

Even with care and respect, the dignity of the dead isn’t guaranteed.

“I’ve seen a lady’s tit fall out of her jersey and I was like, ‘Oh, you poor thing. That’s not the way everything’s supposed to go for you’.”

Emergency services at the scene of last week's fatal incident on the Waikato Expressway at Hampton Downs.

The North Island-based truckie contacted the Herald after reading about last week’s tragedy, and with his own message for motorists to take more care.

The Herald agreed not to name him because he doesn’t have permission from his employer to speak to media.

The living and the dead

“The stuff I’ve seen”, says the driver, “is out the gate”.

“We’re on the road all our lives. What you see is sometimes absolutely beautiful and then sometimes absolutely shocking.”

Beautiful moments are when a farmer’s moving stock on a road “and there are no cones, no flashing lights, no bulls*** and everybody just calms down and moseys their way through”, he says.

“So to me that’s patience, with everybody using their common sense. That’s good, Kiwi sort of stuff.”

There are "beautiful" moments of driver behaviour, such as around stock movement on roads, but bad behaviour far outweighs the good, the truck driver says. Photo / Amos Chapple

Unfortunately, such moments are rare.

More common is dangerous overtaking, cutting off 50-tonne trucks, and a whole lot of distraction at the wheel that ranges from drivers making coffee to putting on makeup.

And, the catastrophic aftermath.

“The number of times I’ve had to take evasive action and not hurt somebody is amazing. I’ve hit one - they pulled out in front of me in a 100km/h, narrow area and they were only doing 30km/h and there’s no way I could stop.”

The survival of the two elderly women inside relied on his split-second decision-making, the truckie says.

“If I hit them where I was I would’ve pushed them into the oncoming traffic. But if I hit them to the right hand side of the car that would’ve pushed them off to the left, and I did - it shot them through a fence.”

The pair were shaken - but alive.

The deadly sleep-in

Others aren’t so lucky, like the delivery driver decapitated when the overturned trailer of another truck crashed into his much smaller vehicle.

It was the first fatal crash the truckie was directly exposed to.

“I had a look in the cab and his leg was sitting on the passenger seat on its own.

“I knew this guy - we’d pass in the mornings, and I’d call him up on the CB [radio] and go, ‘How are ya?’ And the next day he no longer exists.”

He also knew the other driver, who was so distraught he asked others for a gun to kill himself, the truckie says.

“[He’d] come around the corner too fast because he was late - he’d slept in - and rolled his trailer straight into the cab of the other guy.”

He sees a crash on our roads every couple of days, the truck driver says. Image / Richard Dale

The deadliest crash he’s seen had an element of bad luck - one vehicle struck another in black ice between Taupō and Rotorua - but while the two women wearing seat belts in one car survived, only one of the unbuckled quartet in the other car also lived. .

“All I see in front of me is two cars just go bang and fire apart backwards from each other. By the time you get there, there’s still stuff falling out of the air.

“I could tell there’s three dead straight away … when I felt their heads, they were soft at the front and back.”

Overtaking, cutting off, distraction

That incident was more than 20 years ago, but our driving’s become worse since, the truckie says.

Every day other drivers change lanes too close to his truck, when they should be leaving a six-to-seven car length gap, while others juggled putting on makeup or making coffee while negotiating heavy traffic.

“You see them trying to pour hot water into a mug while they’re in three lanes of traffic … and still doing about 15km/h.”

Dangerous overtaking, including on blind corners, is another common sight, he says.

“I can’t work out the mentality. What the hell are you doing? Do you know you could’ve killed yourself quite easily? But it’s hard to tell people that because some just think they’re bulletproof.

“They probably haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

The married father and grandfather just wants everyone to get home safely, and without the trauma he and other truck drivers are left to make sense of.

Witnesses to last week’s tragedy now share that burden, he says.

“Nobody wants to see anybody die. When you see the bad ones you think about it for a week, and then it slowly goes away.

“But it never completely leaves you.”

Cherie Howie is an Auckland-based reporter who joined the Herald in 2011. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years and specialises in general news and features.

SUICIDE

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• Lifeline: Call 0800 543 354 or text 4357 (HELP) (available 24/7)
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