@Mezz 501720 wrote:
Makes me realise how lucky me and my mates were, some of the states we drove home in back in the day were stupid beyond words and we could easily have been killed or killed others.
As Pat said hindsight is a wonderful but useless thing, and Im sure the youth of today are just as dumb as we were when we were young
10 years ago there were similar RTCs and they happen today.
They were only just slightly less common 20 years ago as less young people had access to more powerful cars. Although linked to a party lifestyle, this isn’t strictly a DUI case – the levels of drugs found in her bloodstream were not the amount the CSI lot consider sufficient to cause impairment. It was caused by driving when sleep deprived and lots of non drug users also go this way especially younger people who want to squeeze the most fun out of a weekend. if anything the non drug using / drinking youth are paradoxically often worse as they feel less guilty and more invincible in cars. Drug users are more paranoid of cops (whether they are just SNT or Traffic) due to the risk of stop checks. There was a nasty crash on the A14 a few years back due to sober teens just driving like idiots and beyond their capabilities and the young girl who crashed and killed her friends didn’t even show any remorse and again its created potential feuds between families.
When I lived in Reading there wasn’t any airwave radios for blue light services and I had my radio scanner on nearly 24/7 as I was organising raves then and up to all sorts else, had TVP UHF, VHF mainset, M2HB traffic and the Fire Brigade programmed in constantly (as the cops would often try and get the Fire Brigade to help them close raves on safety grounds). Most of the time talkthrough was left switched on – so when one mobile unit calls everyone can hear it as the mobiles comms were rebroadcast on the big repeater antenna.
Every so often I would hear “HB HB any Tango Romeo (traffic) units available” – one would respond and then you would hear just “pip… pip…. pip…..” on the trafpol channels, and exactly the same on Fire Brigade. I knew immediately there had been a really nasty collision – they did this so the journos (who also had scanners) wouldn’t get in the way of the blue lights and/or publish details of casualties before the Press Office did. (Us scanner enthusiasts actually had a better sense of morals than the journos..)
Can’t help but think that the public money spent on clearing up the crash, inquests, court cases, prison, hospital treatments would in fact pay for a fleet of nightbuses across East Anglia, and traffic safety education for youths, which is exactly what NL does…
