{"id":565610,"date":"2026-08-11T10:36:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T10:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/565610\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T10:36:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T10:36:18","slug":"woman-almost-crushed-by-falling-tree-says-bank-it-sits-on-is-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/565610\/","title":{"rendered":"Woman almost crushed by falling tree says bank it sits on is \u2018a disaster waiting to happen\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
Church was driving in the northbound lane – any closer and she said she \u201cwould have died\u201d. <\/p>\n
She got out of her car to make sure no one had been hurt by the tree, before warning oncoming motorists about the incident. <\/p>\n
The debris was due to be cleared up by Wellington City Council (WCC) and Porirua City Council (PCC) yesterday, but Church felt there was a wider issue surrounding the instability of the bank the tree grew on.<\/p>\n
Wellington woman Maria Church was almost crushed by a large tree when it spontaneously fell onto the southbound lane on Main Rd in Tawa.<\/p>\n
Church said parts of the bank which ran between Kenepuru and Tawa \u201cperiodically\u201d fell down.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had major, major slips all through there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been blocked for days at a time in the past and it surprises me that no one has been killed yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said there was another tree next to the one that had fallen, which she hoped a local council would take down. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat whole bank is just a disaster waiting to happen,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
The bank sits on the border between the territories of WCC and PCC. <\/p>\n
The tree, which stood on Wellington land, fell on to Porirua land.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn assessment of the incident will take place, but looks likely to have occurred due to rain sodden land weakening around the old tree roots,\u201d a spokeswoman for WCC told the Herald.<\/p>\n
When asked if the council knew the bank was a known risk for motorists, she said \u201cthis site hasn\u2019t been on our radar as a location of significant concern.\u201d<\/p>\n
Janhavi Gosavi is a Wellington-based journalist for the New Zealand Herald who covers news in the capital.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Church was driving in the northbound lane – any closer and she said she \u201cwould have died\u201d. She…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565611,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13790,15408,1643,682,3595,34954,48803,38403,13989,71,38145,185,702,14771,138334,111,43,139,69,90,3048,312,65160,61,15981,10510,1354],"class_list":["post-565610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-a","tag-almost","tag-bank","tag-being","tag-by","tag-crushed","tag-disaster","tag-falling","tag-fell","tag-from","tag-happen","tag-is","tag-it","tag-missed","tag-narrowly","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-said","tag-says","tag-sits","tag-to","tag-tree","tag-waiting","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}