A man escaped serious injury last week when the Honda he was ­driving left Flat Road, near Glenarvon Road, and plummeted into the river.

But the car, which travelled about 30 metres down the levee before it made a splash last Wednesday, was not so lucky.

Towing crews and divers gathered at the crash site on Monday morning and used a large crane to pull the wreckage from the river.

The steep levee meant it was too dangerous for the crane to be set up close to the water’s edge, so it reached from the road to retrieve the car.

Active Towing driver Colin, who asked for his surname not to be ­published, said it was rare for a car to crash into a body of water that was so far from the road.

He said those sorts of incidents usually occurred in smaller bodies of water, such as creeks and dams, that were close to the edge of the road.

Colin said large-scale retrieval jobs like the one at Flat Road on Monday were rare and happened about once a year in the Maitland area.

“It’s pretty rare to be this distance away from the road where you’ve got no accessibility to lift something out of the river,” he said.

“We’ve got an 80-tonne crane and we’ve got divers to locate it and attach chains to it so we can lift it out.”