Overturned grain lorry driver on trial
A jury has heard evidence at a trial of a lorry driver whose vehicle overturned and trapped another driver. Steven Barker, 44, from Brechin, appearing at Campbeltown Sheriff Court denies causing serious injury by dangerous driving. On Monday and Tuesday, a Department of Transport examiner and a Police Scotland sergeant gave evidence. The court was told the 44-tonne large goods vehicle Barker was driving overturned on the A83 between Muasdale and Glenbarr on June 23, 2016. The lorry, travelling south through a series of bends, landed on top of a Ford Transit flatbed van heading in the opposite direction, trapping its driver for about four hours. A crane lifted the lorry which was carrying malt barley. Fire service personnel cut a tarpaulin covering the load, spilling tonnes of grain onto the road, to relieve pressure while the lorry was resting on the van. The van driver was airlifted to hospital by helicopter with serious but not life-threatening injuries. The police sergeant told procurator fiscal depute Eoin McGinty that he noticed two curved tyre marks on the surface of the southbound lane, one at the first righthand bend, and the other at the following left-hand bend. The second tyre mark came to an end where the lorry had tipped over. A reconstruction of the lorry’s movements established that it had straddled the central white road markings at the first bend but was ‘almost entirely’ back on the ‘correct’ side of the road when it tipped over. A tachograph report revealed that the lorry, with a legal limit of 40 miles per hour, travelled at 44 miles per hour as it approached the first and second bends, with 36 miles per hour as its last recorded speed. An expert’s report, commissioned by the defence, estimated that the speed at which the lorry would have overturned on that corner was 53 miles per hour. The sergeant disagreed with figures in the expert’s formula, giving his own tipping point speed as 37.6 miles per hour. Defence QC Anthony Graham questioned the police sergeant’s methods for determining the lorry’s height of its centre of gravity, which he admitted was an estimate. On Wednesday, the impartial expert, a former police traffic officer and collision investigator, was called as a witness. He said that his figure, calculated using a formula, was also an estimate and that both his own and the police sergeant’s methods were ‘fair’, but that he felt his calculation was ‘more valid’. The trial before the sheriff and jury continued as the Courier went to press.