By Anna Sargent of RNZ

People in a Canterbury settlement are worried someone could be seriously hurt or killed by gravel trucks pounding their narrow residential roads.

Gravel is being extracted from the Waimakariri River in preparation for the new $1 billion Woodend Bypass motorway.

When Clarkville locals heard that extraction work, which began in summer, was set to resume again on Monday, they blocked the road - with themselves - in protest of trucks using it to haul thousands of cubic metres of gravel.

Rugged up on a cold Autumn morning, about 20 people stood in a line across Baynons Road.

Resident Sarah Manning said they had been dreading the work starting up again.

"When the trucks were going before and after Christmas it was incessant, there were sometimes five trucks on about a kilometre worth of road, and they all pass each other and they were speeding, there were rocks falling, it was extremely unsafe," she said

"We had letter in our mailboxes saying it would start today and that their hours…