Close Call

October 14, 2008

A 70-tonne truck rolled down a steep street, side-swiped a car, smashed through a brick fence and nudged a house in West End this morning. The truck driver parked the truck, which was carrying concrete blocks and a small forklift, on Barnsley Street and got out to talk to workers on a site in adjacent Daventry Street about 7.50am. "He came to see where the position was to unload and as we were talking the truck brakes gave way and the truck went into the fence," builder Manuel Varitimos said. The truck rolled along the footpath and stopped neatly between a car and a house. The car suffered minor scrapes but police said it did not suffer major damage. A man who was inside the house was not injured. "There was an old guy in the house but he's fine," Mr Varitimos said. "He's a bit upset." Police and firefighters remain at the scene.

Run Away Quarry Truck

Wed Jul 9, 2008

A runaway quarry truck has wrecked a car and crashed into a house at Stonyfell in Adelaide's east. Police say the truck hit the parked car, crashed through trees and into a front bedroom of the house. A crane has been brought in to remove the truck from the yard. Elaine Williams was at the back of her house when the fully-laden truck crashed into the front. ”I just thought it was a car crash outside and then I thought it sounded like a lot of glass breaking," she said. Mrs Williams says she investigated and found the truck on its side in her front yard. "I felt very sick to be honest. I thought someone was in it. I didn't get any answer ... I was shouting for the driver." There have also been road accidents onthe South Eastern Freeway in the Adelaide Hills, on both sides of the Heysen Tunnels. A car hit a centre barrier on the city side of the tunnels at about 6:00am. No-one was seriously injured. Another crash happened shortly after 7:00am near the Hahndorf exit on the city-bound side, in slippery conditions. At Bowden in Adelaide, westbound traffic was delayed on Park Terrace as emergency services cleared the scene of a crash between a truck and four cars. A man was taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Ghost Truck

June 24 2009

PEDESTRIANS in Brisbane's CBD were shocked this morning when a ``Ghost Truck'' without a driver rolled down the road and crashed into shops.

Jon Thorne, a couriermail.com.au reader, said the truck somehow missed oncoming traffic at about 10am this morning. "The truck rolled across oncoming traffic and parked itself neatly on the pavement on Eagle St, outside a news agent,'' Mr Thorne said. On social networking site Twitter, several users posted pictures of the crashed truck from their mobile phones, and Charlie Carter said it was lucky nobody was injured."An out of control truck just crossed over four lanes on Eagle St and crashed into Amcal chemist,'' Mr Carter wrote on Twitter, along with a picture of the truck.
"`I was about five seconds in front of being run over.
"It's a miracle that no one got hurt!''
Later he told couriermail.com.au he had just walked into a coffee shop when he heard the crash.
"About five seconds after I walked in this truck came careering over Eagle St, and all of a sudden there was this big bang,'' he said. 
"It hit a steel pole between the newsagent and the Amcal chemist.''
Mr Carter said other people had passed the truck parked by the side of the road earlier, before it began rolling down hill.
"It just drifted over the median strip - it was like a ghost truck, with no driver.''

289's Close Call

With minutes to spare before a train arrived, a runaway bus rolled 150 metres downhill and crashed through a fence onto train tracks near Epping station this morning, closing a large section of the Northern Sydney train line. A short time after 7am, the 12-tonne No.289 State Transit Authority bus careered through a fence onto a railway line at Langston Place, Epping, a police spokesman said. There were no passengers on the bus at the time, and the driver was uninjured, he said.

Runaway Garbage Truck

A RUNAWAY garbage truck careered out of control down a hilly central Sydney street early today smashing through traffic pylons before ramming into a unit complex.

No-one was hurt in the accident and the building, on the corner of Ward Avenue and Roslyn Street in Rushcutters Bay, would need to be assessed for structural damage, police said. Gallery: Our photographer at the scene "Police were called after a garbage truck crashed into a three-storey residential unit block," a NSW Police Force spokeswoman said today. "No one was injured during that crash." The incident comes less than 24-hours after a driverless bus caused train cancellations in the city's north, when it rolled though a fence and crashed down onto railway lines.