Motorists are being urged to take more care around accident scenes as it was “only a matter of time” before an emergency services worker was seriously injured.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) Otago group manager Bobby Lamont said “near misses” were happening across the country, but particularly in FENZ’s Te Kei region, which encompassed Otago and Southland.
He worried that “unsafe driver behaviour at incidents is so commonplace now that often our people won’t report the ‘minor’ incidents”.
He said in February, a member of the public drove on the wrong side of the road past firefighters managing traffic at an incident.
“This led to a confrontation where the man attempted the pull a firefighter out of the cab of a fire truck,” he said.
In another incident in April, a car sped through a traffic incident near Clyde “showing no regard for the safety of emergency service personnel at the scene”.
Lamont said this was “a case of frustrated and impatient drivers ignoring the road accident signs and firefighters asking them to slow down”.
“It turned into a very dangerous situation for our people.
“People must be patient when the road is blocked by a crash. We put traffic management in place for the safety of everyone involved, including motorists.”
Lamont said he was worried it would only be a matter of time before a firefighter was seriously injured.
“There have been many other instances in the past few years, including back in June 2023, on State Highway 6 near the intersection of Lake Hayes-Arrowtown Rd. A person drove through a motor vehicle crash scene at speed, hitting an accident sign. The sign was flung approximately 10m at force and only narrowly avoided hitting a firefighter.
“By not following our instruction, people are endangering themselves, other motorists, our people and other emergency services, as well as the people involved in the traffic incident.”
Nationally, there were 55 health and safety incidents reported through Fire and Emergency’s Safe@Work system in the past two years under the category of ‘motorist behaviours at incident ground’, Lamont said.
However, he said many of the incidents go unreported.
“We tend to get formal reports about the worst incidents, but the feedback from our crews is that they experience some form of unsafe driver behaviour at most incidents.
“We really just want everyone to be safe and need drivers to get on board to help us with that.”