Man airlifted after head-on

Emergency: A 47-year-old man is carried towards the Westpac Rescue Helicopter after he was involved in a head-on collision with a truck on Armidale Road.

LORRAINE Luland was seconds away from tragedy yesterday when a semi-trailer collided head-on with a dual cab utility outside her Armidale Road home.

Having just shut the door after checking her mailbox, the partly deaf 70-year-old said she got the shock of her life when she heard an enormous crashing sound that rattled the foundations of her house.

“I am very, very lucky I wasn’t still outside checking my mail … I am deaf and I still heard it,” she said.

“The whole house and all the windows shook from the sound of the huge bang.”

Clearly still in shock, Mrs Luland said she took a couple of steps to the closest window of her South Grafton home of 46 years after hearing the enormous crash and when she peered outside, was confronted with a massive cloud of dust.

“After the dust settled it was like a war zone, there were bits and pieces of car everywhere,” she said.

“After I saw what had happened I didn’t even want to go outside it was too much of a shock.”

After living in her South Grafton home for 46 years, Mrs Luland said she had witnessed several accidents and many close calls on the stretch of road approximately five kilometres from the Grafton CBD.

“We have had many a close call because people haven’t noticed our indicator when we have been trying to turn into the driveway,” she said.

The scene was one of devastation yesterday.

The bitumen glistened from a 100-metre plus oil slick.

A 40-litre Castrol oil drum lay suspiciously on its side, seemingly mimicking the wreckage of the white Rodeo duel cab only metres away, the 47-year-old male driver still trapped inside.

Fifty metres further along the same side of the road a green Mills semi-trailer covered in vegetation had broken through a fence and had come to rest in a paddock. Oil-covered remnants of the Rodeo were strewn over a 150-metre area, with the progress of a lone tyre thrown from the vehicle halted by a barbed wire fence.

SES workers scrambled to brace the vehicle before using the ‘jaws of life’ to cut away the mangled body of the ute to release the trapped driver.

With the magnitude of the accident written on their faces, ambulance, fire brigade and police watched what has become an all too familiar scene on Clarence roads.

Once cut free, paramedics treated the driver, who suffered serious head injuries, for several minutes before the familiar sound of the Westpac Lifesaver Helicopter blades slapping the air resonated around the area.

Part of the team of paramedics on board the helicopter, Dr Byron Booth said the seriously injured man took some time to stabilise before they could take off.

“Both myself and the paramedics worked on him for approximately 45 minutes at the scene of the accident and he was still in quite a serious condition,” he said.

“He was suffering from very serious head, chest, abdominal and pelvic injuries.”

While it was initially planned to fly to the Gold Coast Hospital the man’s rapidly deteriorating condition necessitated him to be treated at Lismore Base Hospital.

The man was then transferred by ambulance to Lismore Base Hospital where last night doctors were attempting to stabilise his condition.

Dr Booth said once stabilised the man might be transferred to a hospital on either the Gold Coast or Brisbane for specialist treatment.

The driver of the semi trailer was in shock but uninjured.