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A hero helicopter doctor helped save the life of a woman crushed deep under a collapsed bach in his last ever rescue.

Dr Gary Payinda today hangs up his helmet after three years as a doctor for the Auckland Rescue Helicopter service but he’s leaving on a high note after helping save the lives of three Australian tourists caught in a landslide on the Manukau Heads.

The landslide yesterday at Orua Bay knocked a bach off its foundations sending it 15m down a cliff and trapping a woman under 3m of rubble for two hours below the high tide line. Two other people in the house managed to escape before emergency services arrived.

Debris from the slip at Orua Bay on the Awhitu Peninsula being cleaned up. Photo / Andrew Bayly

“You just see a house that looks like a tornado has struck it. It’s just in pieces. It’s just a pile of rubble with the roof still in one piece but ready to tip over. The roof was perpendicular to the sand but being held up by very tiny pieces of debris and what we were afraid of was that it would have fallen down 4-5m on the patient and on rescuers.”

Access to the beachfront houses, which are only accessible at low tide, was difficult so Payinda and a paramedic were lowered about 25m from the helicopter to the bach.

Payinda said St John paramedics were already tending to all three patients when he arrived and Fire and Emergency New Zealand was assessing the safety. Urban Search and Rescue then used steel poles to brace the roof so they could get the woman, who was in her 80s, out and start taking care of her.

“It was a very serious injury and she had been pinned down under all this wreckage for a long time.”

The clean-up begins at a slip at Orua Bay on the Awhitu Peninsula, south of Auckland on February 1, crushing a house and injuring the three occupants inside. Photo / Andrew Bayly

Meanwhile, a second rescue helicopter had arrived to treat the other two patients and take them to hospital.

��“It’s one of those jobs where everything went well. This was the system working at its finest,” Payinda said. “Leaving on a good note, it’s how you want to go out - feeling like you actually helped somebody.

“Seeing all the rescue services come together was spectacular to watch. If it had been high tide, it would have been a different outcome. Without all the teams and their training, it would have been different.”

Franklin ward councillor Andy Baker arrived after the rescue teams had extracted the woman and said the scene was “unbelievable”.

“How the hell did anyone survive? It was so freakish. It could have been so different,” he said.

“The lady was 3m deep into the wreckage. How she survived - everyone was stunned.”

Three people were injured, one critically, after a building collapsed in Orua Bay Beach at Manukau Heads. All three have been taken to hospital. Photo / Michael Craig

The owners of the bach told the Herald they were still too shocked to speak but Baker said they arrived at the beach yesterday and sat quietly watching as their house was getting “smashed to bits by a digger”.

Baker said they had owned the bach for about 12 years and said it held a lot of family memories.

“They were wonderful. Whilst they were devastated about it they were so concerned about the people that had been there. They said, ‘Look the house is important but what’s more important is the people’.”

Baker said he really felt for them. “It was a tough watch.”

Local MP Andrew Bayly also headed to the beach yesterday to assess the damage.

He said the slip probably started 150m up the cliff and the size of the slip meant those in the houses either side of it had been told to leave and the properties cordoned off.

The rental car at the property was “munted” and was evidence of just how lucky the family was to be alive, he said.

Cam Vernon, owner of Vernon Developments, received a call from the response team yesterday who asked him to help clear the debris off the beach before the tide came in.

His team responded straight away bringing in diggers, tractors and trailers to haul the wreckage off the beach and into the car park.

“It was a bit of a mess. It was a whole lot of matchsticks and roofing iron,” he said. “They were incredibly lucky.”

A rental car was also crushed in the Orua Bay slip which injured three people. Photo / Andy Baker

His firm was back at the beach today trucking away the pile of wreckage left in the car park.

But it was not the first call for help Vernon has had since the floods began.

His team helped with the house destroyed in a slip on Shore Rd which claimed the life of a man and yesterday helped clear the remains of the Lakeside Retirement Lodge in Pukekohe which flooded up to shoulder depth on Friday, forcing the evacuation of all 30 residents.

“There’s a lot of stuff that we’ve just been doing because we can. Those poor people have lost everything. What’s a few hours out of my day?”

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