Concerns raised over road sign at deadly intersection

Photograph shows a driver's eye view turning onto State Highway 2 from Wilson Rd South Photo / Andrew Warner

Concerns have been raised about a crooked road sign and the role it may have played in a fatal crash at Paengaroa, which left two men dead and two women badly injured.

The VW Golf was making a southbound turn onto State Highway 2 from Wilson Rd South when it crossed the path of a northbound tanker carrying milk products to Tauranga.

The crash on December 28 killed the 30-year-old driver, an Indian who had only been in New Zealand for less than six weeks. A 31-year-old Indian male passenger who had been in the country for three weeks died at Waikato Hospital hours later.

Suspicions about the role played in the accident by the skewed sign sitting in the middle of the Wilson Rd South intersection with SH2 have been raised by Lani Thompson.

When she took exactly the same turn as the VW Golf the next day, she was struck by how much the sign disrupted her sight line of highway traffic approaching from the right.

"The sign needs to be fixed before someone else gets hurt."

Spot the truck?

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She believed the driver's view of the truck could have been momentarily obscured by the sign at the instant he decided to make the turn across the busy highway. The sign would have blocked his vision of the truck until it was more or less straight in front.

"There was a fraction of a second in it."

Mrs Thompson said the pole of the sign that pointed to the left turn into Wilson Rd South had been twisted, putting the sign out of alignment. The way the crash happened, she did not think the sign could have been damaged in the collision.

She often drove the road and said the problem with the arrow sign was compounded by it being attached too high up the pole so it sat in the sight line of car drivers when it was crooked. Drivers of higher four-wheel-drive vehicles were able to see over the top.

When it was correctly fixed to the pole, the sign did not block views at all, she said.

Western Bay of Plenty road policing manager Senior Sergeant Ian Campion was unable to respond because the cause of the crash was still being investigated. Mrs Thompson's comments would form part of the investigation.

Highway signs are the responsibility of the New Zealand Transport Agency and a spokesperson said it was inappropriate to comment because the crash was still the subject of an active police investigation.

Police have yet to release the names of the men who lost their lives. The wife of one of the victims remains in a critical condition in Waikato Hospital while another passenger, a 42-year-old Rotorua woman, was in a stable condition in Rotorua Hospital.

Rotorua's Malayali Association appealed successfully to Indian associations around New Zealand to raise the $30,000 needed to send the bodies back to family in India.