A DRIVER was trapped for 2½ hours yesterday when his truck rolled on the Murray Valley Highway at Koetong.
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It was the second truck accident for the day; earlier a B-double had rolled on the Hume Freeway near Barnawartha about 2am.
Just after 10am, the Allens Logging and Earthworks truck rolled near the Koetong Pub when the driver failed to take a left hand bend.
Owner of the business Craig Allen said the driver had been working for the company for only a month.
“This fella was new to the logging industry and it’s just caught him by surprise,” he said.
“The bend there has claimed a lot of trucks in the past apparently.
“We had cranes in the pine forests that load the trucks, so we got them out to look after him and secure the truck.”
The driver, believed to be in his 40s, was travelling west when he veered off the right side of the highway and tipped into a bank.
He had been transporting logs from the pine plantation at Shelley to the Norske Skog paper mill in Albury.
The road was blocked for more than six hours while emergency services crews worked to free the driver.
The truck was towed from the scene and the logs were loaded onto a new trailer.
The driver was flown to a hospital in Canberra, however the extent of his injuries were still unknown last night.
Police were still investigating the cause of the accident.
At Barnawartha, the freeway became a sea of XXXX Gold cans that covered the road.
The driver of the B-double was airlifted to The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne after his truck veered onto the median strip crashing about 2am.
Police said the driver, 49, had suffered non-life threatening injuries.
The southbound lanes of the highway were closed for more than seven hours, with traffic diverted through Barnawartha and Chiltern and then back onto the freeway.
