Lucky escape for family
A Taranaki family had a lucky escape when an apparently stolen car crashed into a power pole and into their garden, bursting into flames metres from where they slept.
Householder Lace Singh said the smash outside her home in Waitara shortly before midnight on Wednesday, sounded like an earthquake.
Singh, who had her four children in the house, rushed everyone out when the commotion began.
‘‘One of my kids was still sleeping and I was like ‘get up, get up, we’ve got to get out of here’.
‘‘I was trying to get out and fell on the glass.’’
Singh said before the fire and police services arrived a neighbour came and dragged the 25-year-old local driver out of the car.
‘‘It wasn’t on fire at first, it was just smoking hard out. His foot must have still been on the accelerator.
‘‘Then it caught fire at the bottom and we already had the garden hose trying to put it out but that wasn’t enough.
‘‘It was so quick when it went up.
‘‘Everyone was out having a nosey.’’
Singh and her family were evacuated while firefighters put out the flames.
The driver involved in the crash, at the intersection of Cracroft and Parris streets, also managed to crash into the bumper of Singh’s car, for which she doesn’t have cover.
Sergeant Ross Wright said the man had been taken to hospital and police would follow up with him once he was released.
The morning after the car crashed and burned, the burnedout car remained in the hedgerow and a cabin in which members of the family had been sleeping was visibly damaged by the flames.