A woman who narrowly missed being crushed by a falling tree said the bank it fell from is “a disaster waiting to happen”.

Wellington woman Maria Church was driving through the suburb of Linden on Sunday afternoon when an unexpected sound made her, and the car in front of her, stop in their tracks.

“I heard this big crack and then the tree fell down.

“I didn’t see it falling, it just wasn’t there and then it was there.”

She said the tree fell close to the intersection of Main Rd and Kenepuru Drive. It blocked the southbound lane of the arterial route, which spans the suburbs of Redwood, Tawa and Linden.

Church was driving in the northbound lane - any closer and she said she “would have died”.

She got out of her car to make sure no one had been hurt by the tree, before warning oncoming motorists about the incident.

The debris was due to be cleared up by Wellington City Council (WCC) and Porirua City Council (PCC) yesterday, but Church felt there was a wider issue surrounding the instability of the bank the tree grew on.

Wellington woman Maria Church was almost crushed by a large tree when it spontaneously fell onto the southbound lane on Main Rd in Tawa.

Church said parts of the bank which ran between Kenepuru and Tawa “periodically” fell down.

“We’ve had major, major slips all through there,” she said.

“It’s been blocked for days at a time in the past and it surprises me that no one has been killed yet.”

She said there was another tree next to the one that had fallen, which she hoped a local council would take down.

“That whole bank is just a disaster waiting to happen,” she said.

The bank sits on the border between the territories of WCC and PCC.

The tree, which stood on Wellington land, fell on to Porirua land.

“An assessment of the incident will take place, but looks likely to have occurred due to rain sodden land weakening around the old tree roots,” a spokeswoman for WCC told the Herald.

When asked if the council knew the bank was a known risk for motorists, she said “this site hasn’t been on our radar as a location of significant concern.”

Janhavi Gosavi is a Wellington-based journalist for the New Zealand Herald who covers news in the capital.

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Woman almost crushed by falling tree says bank it sits on is ‘a disaster waiting to happen’