Better signs call as HGV hits house
A Bath woman has described the horrifying moment a lorry ploughed into her house.
Caroline Cooper lives on Solsbury Lane in Northend and said she was awoken by a “crunching” sound on night of Thursday, January 20. She went outside to find a lorry driver struggling to turn in the narrow road, having been sent that way by his satnav.
Caroline said: “Solsbury Lane’s a very small, single-track country lane and when you are coming down the A46 the sat nav takes you down onto this narrow country road.
“So what happens is that people who don’t know the area follow their sat-navs and we see big lorries getting stuck. On Thursday night at 11.20pm we were woken by the sound of crunching. I looked out the window and this huge lorry was stuck in this small area on Solsbury Lane where they turn right and go onto another lane that takes you down onto London Road. He was going backwards and forwards in a very small space and he had bashed the corner of my house off.”
The noise was loud enough for Caroline, and her husband Nick, but even worse for her neighbour Margaret Savage, who was sleeping nearby.
“We have an annexe where Margaret has lived for years and the corner that was hit was right by her head where she sleeps. I looked into Margaret’s house and I couldn’t see her lights on so I decided not to disturb her, but I discovered the next morning that she had phoned me and I’d missed it. She slept sitting up in her chair all night because she was too scared to go back to bed - and she is quite a tough cookie but she was pretty freaked out,” Caroline said.
She added that - after parking his lorry further down the lane - the driver came back to check that everyone was alright. He was very shaken up, he’d driven down from Yorkshire and had been on the road for several hours. His sat-nav had taken this turn down this narrow lane and once you are on it you can’t get off.
“There is a weight-limit sign at the top of the lane, but it’s very small and you can barely see it - especially in the dark,” Caroline explained.
She said that the damage to the house would cost “several thousand pounds to fix” but that things “could have been so much worse”.
She said: “In the 1970s, a lorry crashed into the same house, Browhill Annexe, where Margaret now lives, and killed the man living there. His heavily pregnant wife survived, but the mezzanine where she was sleeping, collapsed. You’re always aware that it could happen again. I think it requires a bigger sign at the top of the lane to let lorry drivers know it is not suitable.”
Our website Bath Live approached Bath and North East Somerset Council’s highways department to ask if they would improve signage on Solsbury Lane. Councillor Manda Rigby, cabinet member for transport, said: “Although HGV access is permitted in Solsbury Lane for loading and deliveries, there’s already a 7.5-tonne weight limit in place and we’re looking into improving the supplementary advisory signage.”