Driver of crash tram ‘may have dozed off ’
‘Micro-sleep’ blamed for disaster that killed seven
The tram driver in a crash that killed seven passengers may have had a ‘micro-sleep’ when he hit more than three times the speed limit and derailed, a court heard yesterday.
Alfred Dorris, 49, is on trial nearly seven years after the crash in Croydon, south London, on November 9 2016 in which 19 others were seriously injured.
A jury was told he may have dozed off at the controls after little more than four hours of sleep before his early shift. Survivors described being flung about as if in a ‘pinball machine’ as the tram derailed and scraped along on its side in the early morning disaster.
With mobile phone torches illuminating the darkness, witnesses said they saw Dorris at the front of the tram with his eyes closed.
One shouted ‘driver, wake up’, before ‘suddenly his eyes opened’ and he said ‘I’m sorry guys, is everyone alright? I saw something in front of the tram’, the Old Bailey heard. Other passengers claimed Dorris said variously ‘I must have passed out’, or ‘blacked out’.
Dorris, who has repeatedly denied dozing off, is said to have told police soon after that he had become momentarily disorientated, thinking he was going the opposite way through the tunnel.
But the prosecutor said: ‘It is no defence to say you were asleep at the wheel. It is no defence to say you were disorientated.’
Jonathan Ashley-Norman, KC, prosecuting, said two sleep experts believed Dorris had fallen into a ‘ micro- sleep’ while speeding through the tunnel. even if it cannot be proved that the driver nodded off, Mr Ashley-Norman said,
he sped into a sharp bend at more than three and a half times the speed limit. This, the prosecution say, shows he failed to take ‘reasonable’ care of his 69 passengers.
The barrister told the jury that Transport for London and Tram Operations Limited, which together controlled the south London tram network, had already admitted criminal failings in health and safety measures.
Mr Ashley-Norman said while the driver’s defence blamed failings in signage and training, the actual accident itself was Dorris’s fault, regardless. Father- of- one Dorris, of Beckenham, south-east London, denies a single criminal charge of failing to take reasonable care at work under the health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
But Mr Ashley-Norman said: ‘Alfred Dorris took the corner too quickly. Instead of 20kph, the tram was travelling in excess of 70kph (43.5mph). At that speed it could not hope to hold the track.’
The prosecutor said Dorris requested permanent early shifts, so he could pick his daughter up from school. But mobile phone analysis showed the night before the 6am crash he was browsing the internet after 11pm – and got up little more than four hours later.
The trial, which may last up to six weeks, continues.
‘Browsing the internet’