Widow presses Sowerby case
Page 12
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
by Kevin Wright • The widow of a lorry driver killed with five others in the Sowerby Bridge disaster has launched a High Court bid to have corporate manslaughter charges brought against haulage firm Fewston Transport.
Brenda Waterworth's husband Derek, 63, died at the wheel of his tipper truck when it smashed into a BT van and a shop killing three women, a man and a two-year-old girl in September 1993.
An inquest later ruled that all six had been unlawfully killed.
The widow is being supported in her case by other victims' relatives, including Glenn Rooke, who lost his wife Angela, 38; and Lorraine Stott, whose husband Peter, 42, was driving the BT van.
At a preliminary High Court hearing in February, Mrs Waterworth's counsel, Kris Gledhill, described the defective 10-tonne truck as "like a time bomb which was let loose on the hilly roads of West Yorkshire".
Fewston Transport admitted using a lorry with defective brakes in May last year: Calderdale magistrates fined the company the maximum of £5,000.
And last December the company was banned from the road indefinitely after North Eastern Traffic Commissioner Keith Waterworth condemned its "cavalier attitude to road safety".