Luck ends women's icy ordeal in wreck

Two badly hurt Indian women who spent seven freezing hours trapped with a dead man in a crashed car were spotted by chance early yesterday.

The death of the driver, Joginder Singh, 63, of Te Puke, brought the Queen's Birthday Weekend road toll to three - the same as last year.

Security guard Brian Gardyne was heading home on his 55cc moped about 5am after a night shift when he spied the roof of a car down a bank off State Highway 2, just north of Te Puke.

He told his boss, Prowler Security owner Barry Jones. After checking with police, who had had no reports of an overnight accident, the men went to the scene.

"The woman in the back was unconscious and the one in front was talking but we couldn't understand her," said Mr Jones. "She was pinned to the dashboard and couldn't turn her head towards the driver. She was calling to him and slapping him ... but could not see that he was dead."

"It was a fluke Brian spotted them. If he hadn't been on a scooter, he would not have."

Emergency services took 40 minutes to cut the back-seat passenger from the wreckage and two hours to free the older woman in front, believed to be Mr Singh's wife.

The couple and a female relative in her 20s had finished a shift in a kiwifruit packhouse about 10pm and the crash is thought to have happened soon after.

Tauranga St John Ambulance area manager Ken Hansen said the temperature when he and his staff arrived was 1C and there was ice on the car.

"Their [the women's] core body temperature was quite warm but their extremities and heads were cold. I'm not sure how much longer they would have survived."