Mrs Uden (59) and Mrs Coochey (37) were killed instantly in the collision, their injuries so horrific a forensic dentist was required to identify the older woman.
Mr Uden (then aged 34) received serious head injuries and was in a coma for several months.
To this day, he cannot remember that blackest of Fridays and is still recovering from his physical and psychological injuries.
The crash was the start of an extended nightmare for the Uden, Coochey, Nolan, Solomon and Shanks families, who lost a member from each of three generations that week.
Mrs Uden's mother died three days after the crash.
Her family agonised over telling her about her daughter, granddaughter and grandson, but in the end they did.
Now, they wanted to help make sure the same type of crash did not recur, Mrs Uden's brother, Chris Nolan, of Timaru, said.
The crash had had a long-term effect on the entire family, he said.
"Two little girls have been deprived of a mother and a grandmother in their lives; a young man has lost his wife, and the mother of his children; a man has lost his wife of 40 years and his daughter; two people have lost their mother and sister, seven people have lost a sister and a niece and 40 others closely related have experienced this loss."
Mrs Uden was someone everyone liked, he said.
She was a gentle, sensitive and intelligent person who had not liked being older and was younger in her views.
Her daughter, Sharon, was an engaging woman and a good mother and wife, who played an active part in her community.
It had been a long grieving process and the family now hoped for closure in a "fair, accurate and factual finding", which they hoped the coroner's hearing would bring.
While Mrs Uden and Mrs Coochey were "paradoxically missing", they were the centre of the process and the family had turned up en-masse at the hearing because they knew the two women would have wanted them to be there to help them understand what happened.
The family had accepted the outcome of the police investigation of the crash and did not wish to re-litigate the circumstances, but believed two things: one, that there was a "serious error in judgement" in the use of one of the braking systems on the truck; and two, that the road was substandard, Mr Nolan said.
It was hoped those two issues would be highlighted through the coronial process, and acknowledged as contributing factors to the crash so that they might be used to mitigate the potential for a similar crash in the future.
Despite that, he wanted to make it clear that while they wanted to know exactly why and how the crash happened, they did not wish to pursue any issue of culpability.
"We can understand human error is exactly that. We are all human."
In the midst of their own grief, they recognised the stress and trauma the driver of the truck was suffering as well, he said.
