By Jesse Graham
A TRUCK driver was lucky to escape without injury after his fully-laden, 30-tonne truck rolled off the Black Spur on Saturday 22 October, closing the road for about five hours.
Yarra Glen police Sergeant Richard Coulson said the truck ran off the edge of the Maroondah Highway on the Black Spur near Healesville in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Sgt Coulson said some wheels of the truck left the road in wet weather and the truck then rolled down an embankment.
“There was no speed or anything – it’s literally just plopped over,” he said.
Though the driver escaped without injury, the truck is believed to have been written off in the crash.
The Maroondah Highway was closed in both directions for about five hours as police brought in several heavy haulage cranes to rescue the vehicle.
The problem with retrieving the truck, Sgt Coulson said, was that it was fully-laden and weighed about 30 tonnes at the time.
He said one of the cranes that pulled the truck out weighed 55 tonnes, and that calculations had to be made to figure out how to rescue the heavy vehicle.
“Once you go below the horizontal, you’ve got to do your maths on that,” Sgt Coulson said.
Sgt Coulson said the driver was not speeding at the time of the crash, but that the road had “notorious“ areas for crashes.
