Mapps loses wheel appeal
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• An appeal court has upheld fines totalling 2530 which were imposed on Yorkley-based B S Mapps Transport and its driver Michael Dainty following an incident on the M5 last November when a set of wheels from one of the company's trailers came off, striking a car and sending it off the motorway.
The company appealed against sentences imposed by South Gloucester Magistrates for having a lorry in a dangerous condition and having defective tyres.
Mapps' 38-tonne GVW artics lost a set of twin wheels from the nearside front axle of its tri-axle trailer while travelling south on the M5 near Michaelwood Services. When the wheels came off they struck an oncoming BMW, sending it up the motorway embankment, Gloucester Crown Court was told. The car was completely wrecked, but amazingly the driver got out unhurt, said Anne Da.nian for the police. After the accident it was found that two of the tyres on the lorry were devoid of tread, said Darrian.
In evidence Barry Mapps said he had the vehicle serviced monthly and checked the wheels personally once a week. He also gave them a visual inspection every night. Nothing untoward was found on the night before the
accident and he could only imagine that someone had tampered with the wheels while the vehicle was parked overnight at Yorkley Lorry Park, he said.
Dainty, in evidence, said he felt nothing before the accident happened. "I was quite amazed," he said. "I was watching my mirrors because the contraflow lanes are narrow for a lorry that size. I glanced in the mirror by the services and saw two wheels which had come adrift by the side of me. I wondered where they had come from. One collided with the BMW but I never felt anything go."
David Lane, for the company and Dainty, argued that there was no way they could have foreseen what would happen.
He asked the court to accept that they bore no legal or moral blame, and to grant them both absolute discharges.
He also submitted to the court copies of reports from Commercial Motor of October 1986 about the "lost wheel mystery syndrome".
It was clear from the reports, said Lane, that incidents of nearside lorry wheels coming off for no apparent reason were well known.
Judge John Da Cunha, however, said he was not prepared to accept magazine reports as specialist documentary evidence. Neither was he prepared to regard qualified mechanic Stephen Sealey — who had driven the lorry the day before the accident — as an expert. He rejected the appeal, upheld fines totalling 2450 against Mapps and 280 against Dainty, and ordered Mapps to pay 250 towards the cost of the appeal.
"We have come to the conclusion that in all the circumstances the penalties imposed by the magistrates court properly recognised the evidence of mitigation," said the judge. "We think those penalties were so low as to indicate that the magistrates had all the facts in mind."