KEY POINTS:
An Auckland woman is thankful to be alive after her windscreen was smashed by a sign ripped from a building in yesterday's storm.
Tania Bowden was waiting to pick her son up in Papakura as gusts of wind and rain buffeted the suburb yesterday afternoon.
The sign came sailing down from a shop roof, smashing the window and door pillar of a nearby car and showering a passenger with glass.
The wind then picked the sign up and bounced it across two more parked cars before smashing it into Ms Bowden's car.
It dented Ms Bowden's car doors and ripped off her wing mirror, then scraped across her roof - shattering the windscreen and ripping off the wing mirror on the passenger side.
The sign smashed another car's windscreen before it settled on the ground.
Ms Bowden said before the sign came off the roof, she was about to open her door and get out.
"The sign would have taken my head off. It was just a disaster."
Ms Bowden said the woman who was showered with glass went to a medical centre to be checked out.
She said the sign was about two metres high and one metre wide
"That will teach me for being early," she said.
Ms Bowden said the sign came from on top of the Fishmart building near Papkura's Southgate Mall.
Fishmart manager Ali Shah said no one was hurt in the incident and information has been passed on to his insurance company.
Mr Shah said the sign had a wooden frame and was bolted to the building's roof.
