Peter Reeves returned to his farm on State Highway 35 yesterday morning to be greeted by his sons, who jokingly said there was a big stash of firewood on offer.
“When I realised that they meant a log had come off a truck, I went down to Pakuwai Bridge (between Whangara and Tolaga Bay) to see what was going on.”
A road worker manning traffic on the bridge told him a truck had approached at speed, the driver had “slammed on the anchors” and a log had shot off the front of the truck’s trailer.
“It landed on the other side of the road so it was just lucky there was no traffic coming the other way . . . if the road worker had been standing there it would have taken him out,” Mr Reeves said.
“The guy was very, very shaken up. I shook his hand and said ‘I’m very glad to be talking to you today’.”
Eastland Wood Council chief executive Trevor Helson was out of town when contacted by The Gisborne Herald and said he had not heard about the incident.
It would definitely be fully investigated — “we do not treat these sorts of incidents lightly”, he said.
However, Mr Reeves, who has farmed on the highway boundary his entire life, believed log falls were happening more regularly than people realised.
In October last year, a 1.5-tonne log fell off a logging truck and landed in the middle of a work site belonging to