"Whoopsie"

This Fuel tanker had a bit of a "whoopsie" this morning.

As I headed into work, the CB started to liven up as other truckies warned each other about an overturned trailer.

The truck and trailer was heading north and got into trouble on a nasty little corner about 4 kilometres north of the Awakino Tunnel.

This corner is narrow, and traffic seems to shy away a bit from the concrete wall on the other side.

With two trucks going the other way the driver must have moved a little too far over in his brand new truck.

The trailer ran off the road and went over. Luckily it didn't pull the truck off too.

Modern tankers are strong and don't usually leak much in this sort of accident.


While news reports had thousands of litres of diesel pouring into the Awakino River, we were in fact collecting it in scrounged buckets, and containers and putting it into 200 litre drums.

The load has to be pumped into another tanker. A pump driven by an air compressor is used, and everything is earthed in case of static electricity causing a spark.

We had a truckload of sand and bags in case we had to buld a dam, but the load was slowly but successfully transferred, with a loss of about 340 litres, from the 16,500 litres he had on board.

The trailer had lifting eyes fitted to it, so it was an "easy pick" as the crane drivers say.

It was a bit sad to see the damage to a trailer which had only done 148 kilometres.

Still it was a long day. Miles from the pie shop, a knocked over coffee flask, and no smoking, saw to that...

News Report NZH