A senior citizen injured after tripping over a cracked footpath in east Auckland needs an x-ray to find out if the impact loosened her teeth when her face collided with the ground.
But after a query from the Times, the hazardous footpath is set to be repaired urgently.
Wendy Evans, 71, set out to walk from the Bucklands Beach Road home of her daughter, Times Newspapers advertising consultant Diana Honey, to look at a nearby property when the incident happened on October 2.
The roots of a large tree on the grass berm in front of a house adjacent to her daughter’s appear to have spread, causing about a two-metre stretch of the concrete footpath to rise and crack.
Evans isn’t sure exactly which part of it she tripped over but she fell face-first onto the ground, receiving injuries to her hands, left knee, and mouth.
“There was blood everywhere,” she says. “It’s still sore from where I bit my lip.
“A man stopped and then a lady pulled in too.
“He came over to me and helped me up. He told me, ‘it doesn’t look too bad’, but it felt bad because I was spitting out blood. It frightened me a lot.
“I kept feeling like my hair was in mouth but I think it was stuff coming out of my lip.
“The blood and like a plasma thing. He helped me clean up my hands and they walked me back down to the house.”
Despite suffering no broken bones in the fall, Evans was in considerable pain.
The two people who stopped to help stayed with her for a few minutes to make sure she was comfortable.
“The lady rang my daughter,” she says.
“She [Evans’ daughter Diana Honey] was in a panic and couldn’t get home quick enough.
“I just had to rest for the day and get waited on.”
Evans had a friend take her to the doctor shortly afterward.
She says her GP told her she needed to get a dental appointment to check if her teeth were damaged in the fall.
“I’m too sore to go and have an x-ray [on her teeth] so I’m waiting a little while to get that cleared up.”
She didn’t report the incident to Auckland Council but says she hopes the footpath can be repaired so other people don’t fall over the same cracks.
“I would say it’s necessary to protect other people,” Evans says.
“I wouldn’t like anyone else to go through what I went through. It was really scary and painful.”
A query by the Times to the council about the cracked footpath Evans tripped over was forwarded to Auckland Transport (AT).
AT spokesperson Natalie Polley replied the same day and says: “We have not received any report on this before.
“We will make the footpath urgently safe as soon as we can by removing some of the damaged concrete and re-levelling the footpath with asphalt to remove the trip hazards.
“The team are onto it, so it should be completed within the next day or so.
“Safety is obviously important to us, so it will be treated with priority.”
