Crane boom crushes Fieldays stalls and truck

MYSTERY CREEK - A mussel farmer from Thames tonight jumped out of the back of his chiller truck at the Mystery Creek Fieldays seconds before it was completely crushed by the boom of a 50-tonne mobile crane.

The farmer, who declined to be named, was selling his mussels at a stand at the agricultural expo and said he was warned by his sister, who was at the front of the truck.

"All I heard was an scream," said the farmer. "I just saw her body language and I jumped out of the truck, and five seconds later, bang!".

"We were very lucky - only one person came out of it with a little scratch".

A police spokesman said the boom fell across three sites, and there were no reports of serious injury from the crash, shortly after 5pm, as Fieldays crowds were finishing their visits to sites.

"A boom on the crane was being lowered when it rolled to the right and crashed through three sites," the police spokesman said.

There did not appear to have been injuries which was "extremely lucky, with the number of people in the vicinity at the time".

The crane driver was unhurt but had to climb down from his cab, which finished about six metres in the air.

Occupational safety staff from the Department of Labour were to inspect the crane before it could be righted.

The mussel farmer said he had been moving shellfish from the truck into a chiller for his Mussel Madness stall when the back of it was crushed.

He was only centimetres from his uninsured 1991 Toyota truck as the boom ripped through it.

The crane driver had kicked out a screen to escape his cab, and when he climbed down was most worried about the people who had been around the crane.

"Lucky it was the end of the day and not a busier part of the day," said the mussel farmer.

Other people who ran to the scene on hearing the crash said a woman in the Taupo native plant nursery site was within a few centimetres of the boom.

Trudi Edmeades, and Darnielle Williams, of Rotorua, ran to the crash site from a cafe 30m away, and comforted a woman who was pulled from a crushed tent on the plant nursery site in the path of the crane boom.

"She was shaking," said Ms Edmeades.

"Her mate pulled her out of the way just in time," said Angie Donaldson, from Kahetara, Wairarapa, who said the woman was initially concerned about her glasses being broken.

A Wellington man, Maurice Wooster, said the crane boom came down quite slowly: "It hit the tent and I think that gave them half a second warning".

The noise of it crashing through the chiller truck and the steel tent poles caused people to scatter: "When I looked up I saw the top of the tent start to cave in - people were diving away".

Mr Wooster said he had been attending Fieldays for 22 years but could remember only one similar incident, when a tractor went through a tent.

- NZPA