Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) are getting fed up with drivers that are not respecting accident scenes - particularly around Otago and Southland.

Otago group manager Bobby Lamont noted three different recent incidents in Central Otago that resulted in near misses, including one where a firefighter was almost assaulted.

In April, a car sped through a traffic incident in Clyde, showing no regard for the safety of emergency service personnel at the scene.

In February, a member of the public drove on the wrong side of the road past firefighters managing traffic at an incident.

"This led to a confrontation where the man attempted the pull a firefighter out of the cab of a fire truck," he said.

At the most recent incident in Clyde, he said it was a case of frustrated and impatient drivers ignoring the road accident signs and firefighters asking them to slow down.

"It turned into a very dangerous situation for our people.

"People must be patient when the road is blocked by a crash. We put traffic management in place for the safety of everyone involved, including motorists," he said.

Statistics showed that nationally there were 55 health and safety incidents reported through FENZ Safe@Work system in the past two years, under the category of ‘motorist behaviours at incident ground’.

However, Bobby said many of the incidents went unreported.

"Unsafe driver behaviour at incidents is so commonplace now that often our people won’t report the ‘minor’ incidents.

"We tend to get formal reports about the worst incidents, but the feedback from our crews is that they experience some form of unsafe driver behaviour at most incidents.

"We really just want everyone to be safe and need drivers to get on board to help us with that.”

Another incident in June 2023 on State Highway 6 near the intersection of Lake Hayes-Arrowtown Road, involved a person driving through a motor vehicle crash scene at speed, and hitting an accident sign. 

The sign was flung approximately 10 metres at force and only narrowly avoided hitting a firefighter.

Bobby said he was worried it was only a matter of time before one of his firefighters is seriously injured.

"By not following our instruction, people are endangering themselves, other motorists, our people and other emergency services, as well as the people involved in the traffic incident."