Truckie driving frozen chicken cut from wreckage after crash
A truckie had to be cut from the wreckage of his rig after it careered down an embankment and landed on a freeway.
It only just missed other drivers, spilling its cargo of frozen chicken for metres across Victoria’s Hume Freeway.
The driver had lost control of his semi-trailer as he veered off the onramp to the Hume Freeway at Seymour, north of Melbourne.
The truck jack-knifed, spilling hundreds of boxes of processed chickens onto the road.
The driver, a man aged in his 50s, was trapped in the truck for about an hour as emergency services crews used bolt-cutters to free him.
“Seeing the condition of his truck, you sort of come here thinking the worst,” Victoria Police Sgt Rhonda Coates said.
“He was conscious and breathing and conversing with the emergency service workers.”
Surrounded by paramedics, the truckie was stretchered into an ambulance and airlifted to hospital with serious leg injuries and a suspected head injury.
He remains in a stable condition in hospital.
Police say given the amount of traffic on the road at the time it’s a miracle no cars were crushed.
“The worst outcome would have been that we were dealing with a fatality and that’s not the case, so he lives to tell another story,” Sgt Coates said.
Police will now investigate the cause of the crash as a massive cleanup begins to remove the processed chickens from the freeway.
“At this point in time we don’t envisage the highway to be open until 11 o’clock tonight,” Sgt Coates said.
