Lives could have been lost in truck accident
THE occupants of two vehicles had lucky escapes when a stabilising arm from a Hiab crane on a truck swung out and hit them as it passed while they waited at traffic lights in July.
The Magistrate’s Court was told that the people were likely to have been traumatised by what had happened.
Judge Graeme McKerrell said nobody could doubt that this had been a very serious incident, and that lives could have been lost. Being stationary in a car and seeing a large metal arm hurtling towards you would be the ‘stuff of nightmares,’ he said.
The truck driver, Ricardo Miguel, of Apartment 6, Hampshire Court, L’Etonnellerie Lane, Vale, admitted using a vehicle in a dangerous condition.
He was fined £1,000 and banned from driving for four months.
The court heard how a blue Mini had stopped at traffic lights at Les Caches, St Martin’s, with the intention of entering Route des Cornus early one afternoon.
A black Mercedes was behind it.
The defendant was coming from the direction of the airport.
As he turned left into Les Caches, the offside stabilising arm swung out to its maximum length and scraped down the full length of the Mini before striking the front of the Mercedes and pushing it backwards onto a low wall.
Police prosecutor Jim Bell said a police vehicle examiner found the Hiab to be in good condition, but a sensor, which would have showed that the arm had not been fixed properly, had been disabled.
The defendant said in interview that while he could recall pushing the stabiliser back into position, he could not recall if he had done it hard enough to engage the locking pins.
Advocate Mark Priaulx, who represented the driver, said his client had no previous convictions. He had been traumatised by what had happened that day.
He ran a firm with 20 employees and had sold his two Hiab trucks in the wake of this incident and replaced them with ones with hydraulically-powered stabilising arms.
The police vehicle examiner had found that the vehicle had been serviced recently.
Advocate Priaulx said his client was just grateful that no significant injuries had been caused.
Metal objects could be written off, but memories would last for much longer.
Judge McKerrell said that the defendant was aware that the arm should have been stowed properly, and that an alarm in the cab had been turned off. He had taken immediate steps to address this, and he did not want to play down the flashbacks he would have experienced.
He was fortunate though, that he was not facing more serious charges.
‘Putting it in plain and simple terms, you didn’t fit the leg back properly, and you failed to see that the switch was in the off position,’ he told the defendant.
