A QUAD bike accident has prompted a husband to issue a safety reminder about how dangerous these machines can be after wife sustained serious injury yesterday.
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Val Halasz said his wife Janine on Tuesday was doing various jobs around their property on Ridge Road south of Narooma.
She rolled the quad bike on the steep slope and he wanted to make several points.
Firstly, he said everyone maligned the black wattle, but in this case it was a black wattle tree that probably saved her life, preventing her from rolling down the hill even further.
Next he praised the emergency services that responded so quickly to the accident.
“The emergency services are amazing - four vehicles and 12 personnel within 20 minutes,” he said.
“She has a fractured wrist and a very nasty penetration of a branch into her calf requiring some surgery and a couple of days in hospital
“It does not hurt to remind of the dangers of these machines.”
There have been a number of accidents on Narooma district properties involving quad bikes.
Tilba dairy farmer Robyn Lucas was also lucky to escape alive after she was trapped under her quad bike in 2012.
The 49-year-old farmer was checking the far end of her farm when she forgot about overgrown cow trail alongside a drainage ditch.
The bike tipped over in the rut, doing a three-quarter roll and landing on top of her in the muddy ditch.
“It was very scary and I thought I was going to die under the bike, but then I realised they went ready for me upstairs,” she told the Narooma News at the time.
“I didn’t panic and thought through what I needed to do to survive.”
Her first instinct was to get her mobile phone out of her pocket but it had already drowned in the ditch water.
After lying there for what she thinks is about 30 minutes and sensing she and the bike were sinking down into the mud, she realised she had to struggle to wiggle out from underneath, seriously injuring her shoulder in the process.
She only walked a short distance when her son Charles, who works with her on their dairy off Sherringham Lane, found her and took her to the safety of the farm buildings about two kilometres away.
Quad-bikes have overtaken tractors as the leading cause of incidents for the first time, according to research conducted by the Australian Centre for Agricultural Health and Safety (ACAHS).
