The scene, at the foot of Pilbrow Hill, was horrific.
This wreckage, lying on its side by the stream, did not look like a bus. The body had been torn away and all the seats were wiped off, except a few at the front.
But worse was the bodies laid out in a line beside the stream, covered with grey blankets. Fourteen of them.
I climbed up the hill to where the bus, its brakes failed, had ploughed through the fence on the last bend to fall 30m into the gully.
Had the driver been able to negotiate that bend, there might have been no deaths - injuries, certainly, but nothing on the scale of this tragedy, the worst on our roads.
Later, there were more comforting scenes to cover - the wonderful effort at Whangarei Hospital, where a special ward was set up to cope with the 21 injured; Minister of Maori Affairs Ralph Hanan and his small team working tirelessly on identification of the dead and injured, and the sad task of notifying relatives. Few slept that night.
Later it emerged that the dead, mainly from the Helensville area, included four generations of one family - matriarch Beryl Abraham, her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter.
Covering the tangi at Reweti Marae three days later reinforced for me the terrible impact the accident had on that family and so many others.
But the abiding image is of that awful, heart-rending scene by the stream. It never fails to come back, every time I drive over that road.
