S
Sufaud
Guest
Sunday Times (London)
September 26, 2004
Death row
The A59 is Britain's most dangerous road, with 43 fatal or serious
accidents over three years. Nine of our readers are condemned to die
by the end of next week on roads just like it. Yet a few hundred
thousand pounds would save some of those lives and many more to come.
Tim Rayment investigates
He was the first person I met. Knocking on the doors of the dead is
never pleasant, and I was putting it off. So I went to the pub. As I
paid for lunch, conscience said it was time to speak to someone. "Is
this a bad road, then?" Why do you ask, said the assistant manager. I
write for a newspaper; I am looking for the most dangerous road in
Britain. "You've come to the right place.This pub has been rebuilt
twice because of accidents. And you may be interested in the stretch
of road that killed my son."
Eileen Campbell works on the A59, a beautiful road that runs from one
side of the country to the other, offering a moving window onto rural
England at its finest. If you have not been there, you should. But
take care on the 19 miles that start in Skipton and end in Harrogate.
This fast but winding asphalt, with junctions that date back to the
horse and cart, is the most treacherous we have.
In fact, if any route has an A in it, pay attention. An analysis of
motoring deaths and injuries shows that we do not understand the risks
of driving. We worry about long motorway journeys. But it is on
A-roads, often before you are out of first gear, that you are most in
danger.
What happened to Eileen Campbell's son is one of several extraordinary
tales that emerge if you ask a computer to work out where the risks
are, then ask people to explain what happened. Kenneth Campbell was
run over by a police car just off the A59. The officers waved
witnesses away without taking names, moved their vehicle before
independent investigators arrived, and three years later they have not
expressed regret. These, then, are the facts behind the roadside
flowers.
The A59 runs from Liverpool up to the Lancastrian city of Preston,
before turning east to enter Yorkshire at the Pennine village of West
Marton. It is the stretch through the Dales that interests us, a
section whose very names - Wharfedale, Airedale, Ribblesdale; Embsay
Moor, Bolton Abbey, Blubberhouses - evoke feelings of peace, like a
tranquil version of the shipping forecast. According to an
organisation called EuroRAP, however, the sudden thunderclap of
crashing metal and crushed flesh is probable.
EuroRAP stands for European Road Assessment Programme, a sister to the
scheme that has prompted dramatic changes in car design by awarding
stars to cars. No car maker now would dare to market a model without
four-star crash results. The new project shows that roads can be
assessed too. Junctions that are a death in waiting? Fast single
carriageway where the barrier to a head-on crash is a line of paint?
Non-collapsible street lamps? No star. True, 9 in 10 accidents are
human error, but as cars improve and drivers slow down, attention is
shifting to the highway. "It is no longer acceptable to have roads
that are inherently dangerous," says Professor Angus Wallace, a
surgeon who puts broken people back together.
We asked the AA Motoring Trust, organiser of EuroRAP, to examine the
accident figures for Britain. We removed bikers from the equation,
because on the roads that are riding heaven, they account for up to
96% of bad crashes. Then, if you take account of how busy each road
is, by dividing the number of deaths and serious injuries in three
years by the journeys back and forth in that time, you get the most
hazardous primary route in the nation. You get the A59.
Robyn Lloyd, aged two, was a back-seat passenger when her father's car
was hit from behind as he waited to leave the A59 for a minor road two
days before Christmas. The Peugeot was flung into the path of a third
car, which struck the side, crushing Robyn and her sister, Christi,
then aged eight. The trainee teacher who started this chain of events
told the inquest she was unaware of the Peugeot until she was 50 yards
behind it, travelling at 50mph. Going to the scene, it is hard not to
hold her responsible. But it was not all her fault. The turn-off is on
a fast bend, with nowhere for Robyn Lloyd's father to wait safely for
a break in traffic, even though the road could be widened. "I was just
driving when the car appeared in front of me," said the teacher, who
had not driven that stretch of the A59 before. Arrested for causing
death by dangerous driving, she was fined £100 for lack of care and
attention instead. Christi, who was not expected to survive the night,
recovered.
Jesse Jackson was a front-seat passenger at another A59 turn-off where
there is no room for an error of judgment. Like the Lloyds, his wife
was waiting to turn right. Because of a momentary mistake, their car
started to move into the path of a lorry laden with bricks. In a
freakish accident, a brick sent flying by the truck's emergency stop
came through the sunroof and hit the middle-aged musician on the neck,
killing him instantly.
When I knocked at the home of Robyn Lloyd, it was the school holidays.
This was the perfect place for a childhood: the semidetached house is
one of many in Yorkshire that have a field behind the garden, in this
case full of calves, plus homes nearby with many playing children.
Over the threshold is a different story. Robyn was a characterful
creature who went everywhere in a pink fairy outfit, seeming wise
beyond her two years. Her parents separated two days before the
anniversary of the crash; the marriage was ending anyway, but the
death did huge damage. Jonathan Lloyd, Robyn's father, is a thoughtful
man with a sad, wry humour. But the scale of his loss is obvious, and
the effect on Robyn's mother, and the two other drivers, can hardly be
imagined.
Similarly, the widow of Jesse Jackson has moved, unable to live in the
house she shared with her husband; seeking her, I met close friends
who said she was starting to heal, but to approach her would do great
harm. I left her alone. The third death in the past three years was of
a biker, who collided with a car and died many weeks later.
Just three fatalities on our road in three years, I hear you say.
Well, for every fatal accident there are 10 that cause serious injury,
and as the living have more to say than the dead, it is time to meet
them. So let us take a break with Betty Hebden, behind the counter in
the cafe at the steam railway that takes tourists to Bolton Abbey. Is
this a bad road, then? Betty is the quiet sort, whose life serving tea
and scones does not bring her into contact with violence. Yet she
knows two people who have been badly damaged on our 19 miles of road,
with life-changing injuries that make you question if the survivor of
the crash is glad to be alive.
Paul Scott is a walking miracle. He should be dead. He broke his neck,
back and face — that's the short version — in a head-on crash at a
closing speed of 120mph. He was so shattered that if he laughs, which
is surprisingly often, he must remember not to shake a lot in case his
head, which is held in place by a bolt, falls off. Yet he has made
remarkable progress, going from someone who appeared to be dead to one
who, in the safety of his home, can walk unaided. Doctors use him as
an example of what can be achieved, to the extent that Paul says
Hello! magazine offered £75,000 for his story. He declined, telling it
here without payment to publicise the risks of A-roads.
There were portents. Once, on a trip into Harrogate, the young
petrol-station manager told a friend to slow down for a narrow,
winding section of the A59. The driver said he knew the road, only to
hit a cliff on the right and bounce into the crash barrier on the
left, ending up balanced on the edge with the back-seat passengers not
daring to move in case the car tipped over. Paul's sister, Fiona,
witnessed a similar event: she was overtaken on the same stretch by a
driver who was unfamiliar with the road, rolled his car on the next
bend and finished up suspended over the gorge.
That's enough for one family, you might think. But one November night,
as Paul travelled home to Skipton, he met a young woman stationed at
RAF Menwith Hill, the US-run spy station that is the biggest village
in Britain not to appear on any road map. She was one of the 1,400 or
so linguists, engineers, mathematicians and other staff who live at
the base, using 23 giant "golf balls" and three satellite dishes to
monitor communications. The balls look eerily beautiful. But the
Americans use left-hand-drive vehicles shipped over from the US, and
at night in a rural area there is little to remind them they are not
at home. When they turn onto the A59 they need a sign reminding them
to drive on the left. There wasn't one.
Paul saw headlights coming towards him on the single carriageway; they
belonged to the young woman, on the wrong side of the road. She was
travelling at 60mph; so was he. It took 4½ hours to cut him out of his
Vauxhall Corsa and three months to get him off life support. She said
she was overtaking a lorry, but it was never traced.
At first he was not expected to live. Then he was predicted not to
talk properly or walk. But he bears no bitterness and is not easily
defeated. During that long first year, a rugby player was brought into
hospital with a broken thumb; don't worry, said Paul, you'll be all
right. The rugby player, facing surgery, forgot his troubles for a
moment to ask Paul what was wrong with him.
A passing nurse gave the list: "He's only broken his back, his face,
pelvis, arms, legs, ribs..." Not to mention the 4in of metal that
support his spine, the damaged main artery, the acid from an abscess
that has eaten into his heart and spinal cord.
His face was reconstructed brilliantly — the bones fragmented like
cornflakes when the skin was removed, but photographs suggest he is
actually more handsome than before. He is not the type to be
depressed: he cried only when told he would be blind. And he is
determined. When he found that life at the pace of other people was
too fast, he decided to be independent. "My brother-in-law was pushing
me around in a wheelchair," Paul explains.
"Only having partial sight in one eye, I'd go to a shop and if I
wanted to see something I'd say, can we just stop — oh, never mind.
Can I just have a look at — oh, never mind. I was being pushed so
fast, unbeknown to my brother-in-law I was missing everything in life,
being pushed in this chair. I thought: bollocks, I'm going to walk.
I'm sick of this. Medical fact says I can't, but I'll prove 'em
wrong."
It started with a few steps; now he walks without a stick. And the
big, manicured garden at his adapted bungalow is all his work. He
began by using a spoon, the only thing he could hold in his one good
hand, to turn the soil as he was wheeled around the garden. Today,
after asking surgeons to smash up and rebuild his hand to make it work
better, he does everything. All that troubles him (and it really does)
is that, with one eye, he cannot tell if he has cut the bushes
straight. What bothers the onlooker is that this attractive,
interesting man is lonely: he rarely goes out, and nobody visits other
than his family. His life ended on the A59. Even now, there is no sign
at the junction.
Paul Scott was a popular man who received 572 get-well cards. That's
572 people who knew to take extra care on our stretch of road. Even
so, the Mercedes of his ex-girlfriend's parents was in a side-on crash
at the same spot three months later. "It's a winding, hilly section of
road," says Paul. "And when you get up over the hill it's virtually
straight. People pick up speed, not realising that there are country
lanes jutting out. It starts to bend — that's when the damage
happens."
There — and on the three-lane sections. Britain is not alone in Europe
in having three-lane single carriageways on which overtaking traffic
can crash head on, and our Roman road through Yorkshire has prime
examples. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, who own 30,000 acres
around Bolton Abbey, were the first people to sign a petition this
summer calling for a cut in the 60mph limit at Beamsley Hill, a
three-lane section where outsiders, who do not know the risks
presented by junctions with minor roads, travel at up to 90mph. The
hill has a sign that reads Road Blocked: it is intended for winter
snows, and is supposed to be hidden for the rest of the year, but is
used mostly to warn of the wreckage of traffic.
Lisa Salmon was on her way to Skipton when she ran out of road on
another three-lane section of the A59. Overtaking a lorry that was
climbing a hill in the crawler lane, just as the road planners
intended, she must have missed the warning sign that the extra lane
was about to end. The journalist was nearly at the brow when suddenly
there was nowhere to go. The lorry was still to her left as the road
narrowed and she saw a refuse truck coming towards her. The truck
drove over her Citroèn ZX car. Like Paul Scott, she sustained terrible
injuries.
She lost her good eye — the law of perversity dictated that her left
eye, which had poorer vision, was undamaged — as her skull and face
shattered like the shell of an egg. She broke her shoulder, fractured
her neck, and snapped a leg in three places.Her brain and spinal cord
were found to be unharmed, and today her head is held together by 40
plates and screws. But there is good news. After having her forehead,
nose, eye orbits, cheekbones and jaw rebuilt, she has become a working
mother for the first time: one child, Conor, was born a year and three
weeks after the crash (impressive, given her injuries), but died in
hospital at the age of two days — an experience worse than the
accident. A second son, Joel, was born this year. Lisa's face still
shows enough damage to draw public attention; we put her in touch with
Paul Scott to see for herself what surgery can achieve.
Salmon admits she was a quick driver, and a careless one in that she
would use her phone on the road. But she was cautious when it came to
overtaking. And she was not a stranger. As Yorkshire bureau chief of
the Press Association, she lived 50 yards off the A59 and she had gone
along the 19 miles to Skipton several times. "I was paranoid about
overtaking," she says. "I never took risks. But when a lorry is
crawling up a hill, who wouldn't overtake when there are two lanes?
Any other driver would have got squashed, just like I did. It's
completely ludicrous that we can have a road layout like that." She is
right. Go there today and you will notice that under the new, safer
road markings lies the ghostly image of the arrows that warned her in
2001 that her lane was coming to an end. They are at the brow of the
hill and, even more amazing, there is a turn-off just beyond it, where
a family like the Lloyds could be waiting. The old design is shocking
to contemplate.
She has no memory of the impact, but it must be lodged in her brain:
as a passenger, she is plagued by the sensation that something is
about to come through the windscreen. "What happened to me would have
happened to anyone," she says. "And probably will happen to someone
again."
There have been no flowers on the A59 all summer. But if you want to
know how lasting is the personal wreckage of a crash, a clue can still
be found. Leave the route at the junction with the A65 and go east for
30 seconds. There, on a bad bend where the concrete fence posts have
been renewed several times, you will see fresh flowers. It does not
matter when you make the journey: the blooms, marking the death of a
young builder called Danny Stanfield, will be there. They have been
replaced every second Sunday for the past 10 years. The only time
Andrew Stanfield, Danny's father, faltered in this tribute was when he
could not bear to see that for the third time a car had left the road
at the spot, crashing through the flowers. That there is still no
cheap, energy-absorbing metal rail on the bend is a source of wonder.
September 26, 2004
Death row
The A59 is Britain's most dangerous road, with 43 fatal or serious
accidents over three years. Nine of our readers are condemned to die
by the end of next week on roads just like it. Yet a few hundred
thousand pounds would save some of those lives and many more to come.
Tim Rayment investigates
He was the first person I met. Knocking on the doors of the dead is
never pleasant, and I was putting it off. So I went to the pub. As I
paid for lunch, conscience said it was time to speak to someone. "Is
this a bad road, then?" Why do you ask, said the assistant manager. I
write for a newspaper; I am looking for the most dangerous road in
Britain. "You've come to the right place.This pub has been rebuilt
twice because of accidents. And you may be interested in the stretch
of road that killed my son."
Eileen Campbell works on the A59, a beautiful road that runs from one
side of the country to the other, offering a moving window onto rural
England at its finest. If you have not been there, you should. But
take care on the 19 miles that start in Skipton and end in Harrogate.
This fast but winding asphalt, with junctions that date back to the
horse and cart, is the most treacherous we have.
In fact, if any route has an A in it, pay attention. An analysis of
motoring deaths and injuries shows that we do not understand the risks
of driving. We worry about long motorway journeys. But it is on
A-roads, often before you are out of first gear, that you are most in
danger.
What happened to Eileen Campbell's son is one of several extraordinary
tales that emerge if you ask a computer to work out where the risks
are, then ask people to explain what happened. Kenneth Campbell was
run over by a police car just off the A59. The officers waved
witnesses away without taking names, moved their vehicle before
independent investigators arrived, and three years later they have not
expressed regret. These, then, are the facts behind the roadside
flowers.
The A59 runs from Liverpool up to the Lancastrian city of Preston,
before turning east to enter Yorkshire at the Pennine village of West
Marton. It is the stretch through the Dales that interests us, a
section whose very names - Wharfedale, Airedale, Ribblesdale; Embsay
Moor, Bolton Abbey, Blubberhouses - evoke feelings of peace, like a
tranquil version of the shipping forecast. According to an
organisation called EuroRAP, however, the sudden thunderclap of
crashing metal and crushed flesh is probable.
EuroRAP stands for European Road Assessment Programme, a sister to the
scheme that has prompted dramatic changes in car design by awarding
stars to cars. No car maker now would dare to market a model without
four-star crash results. The new project shows that roads can be
assessed too. Junctions that are a death in waiting? Fast single
carriageway where the barrier to a head-on crash is a line of paint?
Non-collapsible street lamps? No star. True, 9 in 10 accidents are
human error, but as cars improve and drivers slow down, attention is
shifting to the highway. "It is no longer acceptable to have roads
that are inherently dangerous," says Professor Angus Wallace, a
surgeon who puts broken people back together.
We asked the AA Motoring Trust, organiser of EuroRAP, to examine the
accident figures for Britain. We removed bikers from the equation,
because on the roads that are riding heaven, they account for up to
96% of bad crashes. Then, if you take account of how busy each road
is, by dividing the number of deaths and serious injuries in three
years by the journeys back and forth in that time, you get the most
hazardous primary route in the nation. You get the A59.
Robyn Lloyd, aged two, was a back-seat passenger when her father's car
was hit from behind as he waited to leave the A59 for a minor road two
days before Christmas. The Peugeot was flung into the path of a third
car, which struck the side, crushing Robyn and her sister, Christi,
then aged eight. The trainee teacher who started this chain of events
told the inquest she was unaware of the Peugeot until she was 50 yards
behind it, travelling at 50mph. Going to the scene, it is hard not to
hold her responsible. But it was not all her fault. The turn-off is on
a fast bend, with nowhere for Robyn Lloyd's father to wait safely for
a break in traffic, even though the road could be widened. "I was just
driving when the car appeared in front of me," said the teacher, who
had not driven that stretch of the A59 before. Arrested for causing
death by dangerous driving, she was fined £100 for lack of care and
attention instead. Christi, who was not expected to survive the night,
recovered.
Jesse Jackson was a front-seat passenger at another A59 turn-off where
there is no room for an error of judgment. Like the Lloyds, his wife
was waiting to turn right. Because of a momentary mistake, their car
started to move into the path of a lorry laden with bricks. In a
freakish accident, a brick sent flying by the truck's emergency stop
came through the sunroof and hit the middle-aged musician on the neck,
killing him instantly.
When I knocked at the home of Robyn Lloyd, it was the school holidays.
This was the perfect place for a childhood: the semidetached house is
one of many in Yorkshire that have a field behind the garden, in this
case full of calves, plus homes nearby with many playing children.
Over the threshold is a different story. Robyn was a characterful
creature who went everywhere in a pink fairy outfit, seeming wise
beyond her two years. Her parents separated two days before the
anniversary of the crash; the marriage was ending anyway, but the
death did huge damage. Jonathan Lloyd, Robyn's father, is a thoughtful
man with a sad, wry humour. But the scale of his loss is obvious, and
the effect on Robyn's mother, and the two other drivers, can hardly be
imagined.
Similarly, the widow of Jesse Jackson has moved, unable to live in the
house she shared with her husband; seeking her, I met close friends
who said she was starting to heal, but to approach her would do great
harm. I left her alone. The third death in the past three years was of
a biker, who collided with a car and died many weeks later.
Just three fatalities on our road in three years, I hear you say.
Well, for every fatal accident there are 10 that cause serious injury,
and as the living have more to say than the dead, it is time to meet
them. So let us take a break with Betty Hebden, behind the counter in
the cafe at the steam railway that takes tourists to Bolton Abbey. Is
this a bad road, then? Betty is the quiet sort, whose life serving tea
and scones does not bring her into contact with violence. Yet she
knows two people who have been badly damaged on our 19 miles of road,
with life-changing injuries that make you question if the survivor of
the crash is glad to be alive.
Paul Scott is a walking miracle. He should be dead. He broke his neck,
back and face — that's the short version — in a head-on crash at a
closing speed of 120mph. He was so shattered that if he laughs, which
is surprisingly often, he must remember not to shake a lot in case his
head, which is held in place by a bolt, falls off. Yet he has made
remarkable progress, going from someone who appeared to be dead to one
who, in the safety of his home, can walk unaided. Doctors use him as
an example of what can be achieved, to the extent that Paul says
Hello! magazine offered £75,000 for his story. He declined, telling it
here without payment to publicise the risks of A-roads.
There were portents. Once, on a trip into Harrogate, the young
petrol-station manager told a friend to slow down for a narrow,
winding section of the A59. The driver said he knew the road, only to
hit a cliff on the right and bounce into the crash barrier on the
left, ending up balanced on the edge with the back-seat passengers not
daring to move in case the car tipped over. Paul's sister, Fiona,
witnessed a similar event: she was overtaken on the same stretch by a
driver who was unfamiliar with the road, rolled his car on the next
bend and finished up suspended over the gorge.
That's enough for one family, you might think. But one November night,
as Paul travelled home to Skipton, he met a young woman stationed at
RAF Menwith Hill, the US-run spy station that is the biggest village
in Britain not to appear on any road map. She was one of the 1,400 or
so linguists, engineers, mathematicians and other staff who live at
the base, using 23 giant "golf balls" and three satellite dishes to
monitor communications. The balls look eerily beautiful. But the
Americans use left-hand-drive vehicles shipped over from the US, and
at night in a rural area there is little to remind them they are not
at home. When they turn onto the A59 they need a sign reminding them
to drive on the left. There wasn't one.
Paul saw headlights coming towards him on the single carriageway; they
belonged to the young woman, on the wrong side of the road. She was
travelling at 60mph; so was he. It took 4½ hours to cut him out of his
Vauxhall Corsa and three months to get him off life support. She said
she was overtaking a lorry, but it was never traced.
At first he was not expected to live. Then he was predicted not to
talk properly or walk. But he bears no bitterness and is not easily
defeated. During that long first year, a rugby player was brought into
hospital with a broken thumb; don't worry, said Paul, you'll be all
right. The rugby player, facing surgery, forgot his troubles for a
moment to ask Paul what was wrong with him.
A passing nurse gave the list: "He's only broken his back, his face,
pelvis, arms, legs, ribs..." Not to mention the 4in of metal that
support his spine, the damaged main artery, the acid from an abscess
that has eaten into his heart and spinal cord.
His face was reconstructed brilliantly — the bones fragmented like
cornflakes when the skin was removed, but photographs suggest he is
actually more handsome than before. He is not the type to be
depressed: he cried only when told he would be blind. And he is
determined. When he found that life at the pace of other people was
too fast, he decided to be independent. "My brother-in-law was pushing
me around in a wheelchair," Paul explains.
"Only having partial sight in one eye, I'd go to a shop and if I
wanted to see something I'd say, can we just stop — oh, never mind.
Can I just have a look at — oh, never mind. I was being pushed so
fast, unbeknown to my brother-in-law I was missing everything in life,
being pushed in this chair. I thought: bollocks, I'm going to walk.
I'm sick of this. Medical fact says I can't, but I'll prove 'em
wrong."
It started with a few steps; now he walks without a stick. And the
big, manicured garden at his adapted bungalow is all his work. He
began by using a spoon, the only thing he could hold in his one good
hand, to turn the soil as he was wheeled around the garden. Today,
after asking surgeons to smash up and rebuild his hand to make it work
better, he does everything. All that troubles him (and it really does)
is that, with one eye, he cannot tell if he has cut the bushes
straight. What bothers the onlooker is that this attractive,
interesting man is lonely: he rarely goes out, and nobody visits other
than his family. His life ended on the A59. Even now, there is no sign
at the junction.
Paul Scott was a popular man who received 572 get-well cards. That's
572 people who knew to take extra care on our stretch of road. Even
so, the Mercedes of his ex-girlfriend's parents was in a side-on crash
at the same spot three months later. "It's a winding, hilly section of
road," says Paul. "And when you get up over the hill it's virtually
straight. People pick up speed, not realising that there are country
lanes jutting out. It starts to bend — that's when the damage
happens."
There — and on the three-lane sections. Britain is not alone in Europe
in having three-lane single carriageways on which overtaking traffic
can crash head on, and our Roman road through Yorkshire has prime
examples. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, who own 30,000 acres
around Bolton Abbey, were the first people to sign a petition this
summer calling for a cut in the 60mph limit at Beamsley Hill, a
three-lane section where outsiders, who do not know the risks
presented by junctions with minor roads, travel at up to 90mph. The
hill has a sign that reads Road Blocked: it is intended for winter
snows, and is supposed to be hidden for the rest of the year, but is
used mostly to warn of the wreckage of traffic.
Lisa Salmon was on her way to Skipton when she ran out of road on
another three-lane section of the A59. Overtaking a lorry that was
climbing a hill in the crawler lane, just as the road planners
intended, she must have missed the warning sign that the extra lane
was about to end. The journalist was nearly at the brow when suddenly
there was nowhere to go. The lorry was still to her left as the road
narrowed and she saw a refuse truck coming towards her. The truck
drove over her Citroèn ZX car. Like Paul Scott, she sustained terrible
injuries.
She lost her good eye — the law of perversity dictated that her left
eye, which had poorer vision, was undamaged — as her skull and face
shattered like the shell of an egg. She broke her shoulder, fractured
her neck, and snapped a leg in three places.Her brain and spinal cord
were found to be unharmed, and today her head is held together by 40
plates and screws. But there is good news. After having her forehead,
nose, eye orbits, cheekbones and jaw rebuilt, she has become a working
mother for the first time: one child, Conor, was born a year and three
weeks after the crash (impressive, given her injuries), but died in
hospital at the age of two days — an experience worse than the
accident. A second son, Joel, was born this year. Lisa's face still
shows enough damage to draw public attention; we put her in touch with
Paul Scott to see for herself what surgery can achieve.
Salmon admits she was a quick driver, and a careless one in that she
would use her phone on the road. But she was cautious when it came to
overtaking. And she was not a stranger. As Yorkshire bureau chief of
the Press Association, she lived 50 yards off the A59 and she had gone
along the 19 miles to Skipton several times. "I was paranoid about
overtaking," she says. "I never took risks. But when a lorry is
crawling up a hill, who wouldn't overtake when there are two lanes?
Any other driver would have got squashed, just like I did. It's
completely ludicrous that we can have a road layout like that." She is
right. Go there today and you will notice that under the new, safer
road markings lies the ghostly image of the arrows that warned her in
2001 that her lane was coming to an end. They are at the brow of the
hill and, even more amazing, there is a turn-off just beyond it, where
a family like the Lloyds could be waiting. The old design is shocking
to contemplate.
She has no memory of the impact, but it must be lodged in her brain:
as a passenger, she is plagued by the sensation that something is
about to come through the windscreen. "What happened to me would have
happened to anyone," she says. "And probably will happen to someone
again."
There have been no flowers on the A59 all summer. But if you want to
know how lasting is the personal wreckage of a crash, a clue can still
be found. Leave the route at the junction with the A65 and go east for
30 seconds. There, on a bad bend where the concrete fence posts have
been renewed several times, you will see fresh flowers. It does not
matter when you make the journey: the blooms, marking the death of a
young builder called Danny Stanfield, will be there. They have been
replaced every second Sunday for the past 10 years. The only time
Andrew Stanfield, Danny's father, faltered in this tribute was when he
could not bear to see that for the third time a car had left the road
at the spot, crashing through the flowers. That there is still no
cheap, energy-absorbing metal rail on the bend is a source of wonder.
