• A 60rnm depression in a Newcastle road could have
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triggered a horrific crash in which four people were killed in a collision between a bus and an artic unit. A police video reconstruction of the case was made in an effort to solve the mystery of exactly why a lorry swerved across Newcastle's Scotswood Road, hitting a bus.
It shows how an experienced police driver had to wrestle to control an articulated truck after it hit a raised manhole cover near the scene of the accident.
Four people died in the accident, including the driver of the bus who was thrown from his vehicle.
Returning a verdict, however, of accidental death on all four victims, Newcastle City Coroner Patrick Cuff admitted that the original cause of the crash was still a mystery.
The inquest was told how police investigators had great difficulty in piecing together the final seconds before the crash because the lorry's driver — Alan Pendleton, of Blackhill, County Durham — could remember nothing about it. He was severely injured in the crash and did not regain consciousness for several days.
The inquest heard the police were forced to film two reconstructions of the crash. The first showed a smaller police lorry being driven along the fatal stretch of Scotswood Road.
In the second video shown at the inquest, a lorry of similar size and type as that driven by Pendleton was driven over the three dips.
"There was no effect over the first two," said Constable Alan Davidson, who drove the lorry. "But a considerable amount of bounce was felt when the lorry hit the depression and then the raised manhole cover." He admitted a driver unaware of the poor road surface and possibly driving one-handed could have been caught "unawares".