Two motorists were lucky to walk away after a dramatic crash when their car careened off the road and down a bank in Canterbury yesterday afternoon.
The Boxing Day crash, on State Highway 73 near Porters Pass at 12.50pm, was captured on video by a following driver.
The clip showed the silver vehicle travelling along the road between two other vehicles before swerving left, suddenly right into the oncoming lane, and then left again, careening off the road and down a bank.
Matthew Kelly, who caught the crash on his dash camera while travelling with his family, told 1News that the vehicle appeared to have clipped the gravel on the left verge of the road before losing control.
“They overcorrected. They saw oncoming traffic to the left and went off the bank.”
Kelly and the car in front of him quickly pulled over to check the damage and see whether they could help.
“The bank was quite a shallow downhill. [The vehicle] rolled and hit a tree or a brush down the bottom.
“[Bystanders] got down there quite quickly to check that everyone was OK, but the car was damaged.”
A short while later, Kelly said, the two occupants of the crashed vehicle managed to get out safely and waited for their vehicle to be towed out.
Kelly said that, when the car first went over the bank, he thought it would be “a lot worse than it was”.
“Just the sheer fact that we didn’t know what was over the bank because it’s a rocky area, and we just absolutely thought it would be a lot worse than it was.”
Porters Pass, the third-highest point on the South Island’s state highway network at a peak elevation of 939 metres, traversed rugged terrain as it connected the east and west coasts.
Police said it was made aware of a single-vehicle crash on SH73, Porters Pass, at around 12.50pm yesterday.
“There were no reports of injuries or road blocking,” a spokesperson said.
Four people have been killed on New Zealand roads this this holiday period.
The most recent was this morning, when a vehicle crashed on State Highway 25 between Thames and Coromandel. Four others sustained minor injuries.