Vic couple survive as truck destroys home

SYDNEY (AAP) - An out-of-control semi-trailer reduced the home of a Victorian young couple to splinters, destroying everything but the room where they were sleeping.
Megan Davis, seven months' pregnant, and her partner Adam Fielding, escaped unharmed through a window after the truck devastated their weatherboard home in Loch, South Gippsland, in the middle of the night.
"Everything started shaking, it was like an earthquake with explosions," Mr Fielding told reporters outside his flattened home.
"I got out to open the bedroom door just to find a nice, big, empty hole where the bedroom used to be and a truck's tail lights in it."
The truck driver had lost control on a slippery hill and found the semi headed straight for a petrol station at a T-intersection in the small southeast Victorian town.
Police believe he wrenched the wheel of the truck, loaded with cattle carcasses, to avoid hitting the petrol station before bailing out of the cabin.
What was to be the nursery for Ms Davis' unborn baby was obliterated.
"It's a bit scary to think about what could have happened," she said.
"I was just glad the baby wasn't actually alive in the house because it would've been gone."
Paramedic Danny Slattery said the truck blasted through the weatherboard house and out the back, demolishing a concrete water tank.
"The truck has gone right through the house, so much so that on our arrival all we could see was the tail-lights down the other end of the house..." Mr Slattery said.
Leading Senior Constable Gary Slink said the house looked like firewood splinters.
It's not the first time a truck has headed for the house.
About three months ago a garbage truck apparently had braking problems on the same hill - a 50km/h zone - and the driver veered away from the petrol station, Snr Const Slink said.
"The truck wound up on its side on the footpath right in front of this same house,' he told Fairfax Radio on Monday.
He said the couple, aged in their 20s, were shaken and shocked after climbing out of the bedroom window to find the truck driver lying on the road.
Mr Slattery said paramedics put the man into an induced coma because of the seriousness of his head injuries.
The driver, aged about 50, was airlifted to The Alfred hospital in Melbourne in a critical condition after the accident, about 3.40am (AEST) on Monday.