Auckland woman Joan Ogilvie describes nearly being hit by runaway truck in Silverdale

A truck crashed into a tyre shop at Silverdale after the handbrake failed and it rolled across the Hibiscus Coast Highway. Picture / Tony Versey

A few seconds are all that came between Joan Poultney and being "wiped off the face of the earth".

The Auckland woman was driving home from Albany yesterday when she saw a truck and trailer unit heading straight for her across a four-lane highway, and slammed on the brakes.

Poultney believes the speed of her reaction is the reason she's still alive. The runaway truck, which had rolled away from the nearby BP service station in Silverdale, missed slamming into her car by just a couple of metres.

I knew that truck was heading for disaster somewhere down that hill.

Joan Poultney

It then went on to roll down a bank and crash into a container and the Tyre Corp store, leaving a downed lamppost and several smashed cars in its wake.

"All I was faced with was this great truck heading towards me, and with a trailer on board," Poultney said.

"He must have missed me by about two feet."

She didn't have time to feel afraid, it was only a matter of seconds from the time she noticed the truck rolling unattended across the highway to when it glided past her car, going about 50 or 60km/h.

"It was so fast, quite frankly. How on Earth it got through from one side of the highway to the other, I don't know."

Poultney said she was "quite calm" when it happened.

"Good Lord, I was so lucky. I could have been wiped off the face of the Earth . . . if it had hit anybody they wouldn't have survived, because he was going so fast.

"It was definitely out-of-control."

Poultney, who carried on driving after the truck went past, "couldn't believe what had happened."

She did not see what happened to the truck.

"I knew that truck was heading for disaster somewhere down that hill."

She didn't find out what happened until this morning, when she decided to head down to the crash site and speak to the tyre shop owner, Grant Ogilvie.

He was probably thinking 'how the hell do I explain this to my bosses?'

Grant Ogilvie

Ogilvie said the truck driver was fuelling the vehicle with diesel at the BP station and had gone inside the building when the truck began to roll away.

The truck, which was carrying a load of dirt, hit three cars in a used-car saleyard, narrowly missed an LPG tank, crossed four lanes of the highway, took out a lamppost, rolled down a bank, and crashed into a storage container outside the Tyre Corp shop.

"It smacked the container about 30 feet across the ground into four or five other parked cars . . . the momentum of the trailer, that just pushed the back of the truck up into the roof and inside our building."

Miraculously, nobody was hurt. Ogilvie was in his office when he heard a bang - the sound of the truck hitting cars in the saleyard.

Looking out the door, he saw the power pole "come spearing out the front of the building and on top of the car", and almost simultaneously heard another "big bang" and saw the storage container shooting across the carpark, with "cars spreading in all directions" around it.

"It sounded like a bomb going off."

Ogilvie called 111and asked for an ambulance before discovering there was no driver in the truck, and nobody else injured.

The driver came running over "in shock" saying it was his truck.

"He was probably thinking 'how the hell do I explain this to my bosses?'"

Ogilvie described the whole experience as "surreal".

Members of the community had been sending messages and visiting the shop offering their help to get the place cleaned up and ready for business again on Monday.

The truck was removed from the building about 11pm yesterday. Ogilvie said they'd found the fuel nozzle from the gas station lying in the mess left behind in their building.

A police spokeswoman said no decision on charges has been made.