S imon Jenkins will never forget the tragic events of 7
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June last year. That was the day his brother Andrew died when a 1401ig wheel came off a truck and smashed into his Rover on the MG.
Andrew. 36, was killed instantly as the hurtling wheel ripped open the passenger side of the car, shattering the windscreen and crushing the roof. Police estimated that the combined speed of collision of wheel and car was 120mph: enough force to embed the Rover in the crash barrier.
At the subsequent inquest ar Walsall magistrate's court, coroner Aldan Cotter said the wheel had "bounced like the Dambusters' bomb across the six lanes of the busiest stretch of mf iti may in Eimpe.
"It is a tragedy that Mr Jenkins died, hut a miracle that no.one else did," he continued. "One wonders what might have happened if it had struck a minibus full of children." A verdict of accidental death was recorded.
This incident is being highlighted by road haulage safety campaign Brake as it presses the Government to fund research into why wheels fly off trucks, buses, and coaches. And sadly it's by no means the only wheel-loss tragedy that has occurred.
Last October a truck wheel killed 54-year-old Roger Mathers when it hit his Fiat Punto while he was driving along the A14 near Bury St Edmunds. In 1993, 24-year-old expectant mother Frances Chevalier died on the M53 in Cheshire a few days before Christmas when a wheel flew off a truck and smashed into her Vauxhall Cavalier. Sergeant Ray Pitt of the West Midlands Constabulary has records of 11 deaths in 66 wheel-loss incidents going back to 1985. So far this year he has recorded 21 losses on the stretches of the M6, M5, and M42 his force is responsible for ---75 miles of motorway in all.
Department of Transport vehicle examiner Richard Dixon is convinced that many losses go unrecorded if there are no witnesses and no-one is injured. "The vehicle operator isn't going to tell anyone because he might get into trouble," he says.
Sergeant Pitt agrees. "We often find truck wheels lying on the carriageway with of course no indication as to which vehicle they've come from," he says. "Recently we had a heftily built electronic control box by the side of the motorway completely wrecked by a flying wheel—a good indication of the dam
age they can din. And if a truck driver does lose a wheel, calls out the breakdown service, and help arrives before we spot what's happened. he's unlikely to say anything to us about it."
Sergeant Pitt has now gained the support of the Association of Chief Police Officers in his efforts to compile a nationwide statistical survey of the scale of the problem.
He admits that extracting figures from other constabnlaries is a long-drawn-out process. "It's no immense task," he says. "When somebody dies in a road traffic accident, it's not filed under 'killed by an HGV wheel'."
Surprisingly, the Department of Transport has yet to assess I he scale of the wheel-loss phenomenon. In a reply to Liberal Democrat MP Paul Tyler on 1 July, the then Secretary of State for Transport Steven Norris said his department and the Vehicle Inspectorate would be looking at ways of improving the collection and collation of data to give an accurate countrywide picture of the extent of the problem. In a reply to Liberal Democrat MP Chris Davies, Norris added that an analysis of the Vehicle In4wetorate's accident and defect database showed I hat there had been 323 accidents involving the loss of wheels from commercial vehicle:since 1982.
However. special A engineering consultant Don Wright) has conducted his own independent nvestigation and points out that it's not a new problem. "It was happening as long ago as the 1940s, and I estimate that n 1991 alone there were over 2,000 losses," le says. "I calculate that deaths are running at between five and 10 a year."
And whee0oss is by no means a peculiarly British problem.
On 3 August a 16-year-old girl was injured when a car driven by her mother was hit by one of two wheels that came off a truck not far from Jenbach in Austria. Two years ago a fuel tanker travelling from Haarlem in the Netherlands to Schipol Airport just outside Amsterdam can't to a grinding halt when it
lost two wheels. lo.