ROAD DANGERS.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20542, 18 February 1935, Page 7

ROAD DANGERS.

Need for Stone Coping at Cliff Edges. WANGAMOA FATALITY. (Special to the " Star.'*) NELSON. This Day. A Fiat car, a 1926 model, salvaged after the Berry fatality on the Wangamoa Hill, was hauled up to the road by the Nelson Car Wreckers Company, after great exertion and no little risk. - The company bought the wreck from the Norwich Union Company. It had fallen almost one hundred feet in a vertical drop and then tumbled over'a huge rock. The haul involved an almost vertical lift and constant anchoring by wires attached to iron stakes on trees to hold the ground as it was gained. At the very last, ropes were anchored to a tree above the road, but snapped like carrots, and the block whizzed past the heads of the workers on the hauling lorry. The car dropped back four leet, but it was held by emergency wires anchored to steel rods driven into the road surface. Fortunately the chassis was not damaged except for a bent front axle, and the car came up the cliff face resting on its tyres, which were not punctured. An examination of the scene suggests that coronial notice might have been taken of the need for occasional stone coping along the edge of the narrowest part of the roads, especially near a steep drop. This place was something of a trap for an inexperienced driver, as the danger of the cliff edge was obscured by shrubs and trees, suggesting a substantial ledge below them, whereas the car fell through this fringe foliage as if it had been brown paper.