The man who rescued someone trapped after what has been described a tornado in Northland says it’s lucky no one died.<\/p>\n
Garth Richter said his wife alerted him to a caravan rolling through the camp.<\/p>\n
“I said ‘twister’, and I jumped up and told her to get out of the caravan as quickly as possible,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I came out and saw a totally squashed caravan, so I ran to that … I would have thought that whoever was in it would be dead.”<\/p>\n
After Richter established the destroyed caravan had been unoccupied, he saw another had tipped over with someone still inside.<\/p>\n
“I shouted to him, and he answered me, but said he was hurt,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I pulled the skylight off that was next to him, which he wasn’t really happy about, but I assured him that was the least of his problems, and just propped him up and helped him.<\/p>\n
“He thinks he’s broken his shoulder blade and his back.”<\/p>\n
Bystanders called emergency services to the scene who cut the front window of the caravan to rescue the man.<\/p>\n
Richter said it was incredibly fortunate the situation was not worse.<\/p>\n
“First of all, he’s an 80-year-old man, to be alive after this is quite something,” he said.<\/p>\n
Richter said if the other caravan had not been stopped by a tree it would have “cartwheeled through the whole camp”.<\/p>\n
There had been damage to others in the campsite also, he said.<\/p>\n
“Most people have got a bit of damage, but it’s superficial, windows and through the sides, and a lot of stuff lying all over the place.”<\/p>\n
His own caravan had also been superficially damaged, he said.<\/p>\n
MetService said intense rain and thunderstorms in the area meant there was the potential for tornadoes.<\/p>\n
But a spokesperson could not say whether one had occurred.<\/p>\n
However, wind gusts of up to 75km\/h had been recorded in the Kaeo area.<\/p>\n
Source: RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The man who rescued someone trapped after what has been described a tornado in Northland says it’s lucky no one died. Garth Richter said his wife alerted him to a caravan rolling through the camp. “I said ‘twister’, and I jumped up and told her to get out of the caravan as quickly as possible,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14290,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14288\/revisions\/14290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}