HIGHWAY FROM HELL
A grief-stricken husband who lost his wife, motherin-law and brother-in-law in a crash on the killer A9 has told of his horror that it could be years before the road is upgraded.
Katie Bastion- Strong, 46, herr brother Jared Bastion, 45, and mumm Mary-Lou Mauch, 75, were touringg Scotland to check out filming sitess for Outlander when their car crashedd head-on into a lorry last August.
Katie’s husband Chris Strong saidid the tragedy – put down to roadad conditions – left seven childrenen without a parent.
He said: “More can be done to makeke that road safer and they have to do it. My daughters have lost their mum, Jared’s four children have lost their dad. This has to stop before more families’ lives are ruined.”
The Scottish Government has said they cannot guarantee to meet their promise to dual 70 miles of the A9 between Perth and Inverness by 2025.
Chris’s family are three out of the 17 people killed on the road in the past year – the most lethal 12 months for the A9 in 15 years.
The family had been fans of the hit TV show Outlander and travelled to the Highlands from Illinois in the US to see where it was set.
Katie, who worked for the American College of Surgeons, was driving a rental car on the A9 at Ralia, near Newtonmore, Inverness- shire, when she turned a corner and hit the lorry.
Her brother and mum were killed instantly, while she was taken to hospital, where she died three days later.
Hours before the tragedy, Jared had shared a video of the trip on social media and wrote they had been “white knuckle driving” around the Isle of Skye on a single carriageway road with “traffic going both ways”.
Chris, 45, f lew over to Scotland as soon as he could and said he was shocked by the road’s condition.
He said: “I went to the site of the accident. Physically, I saw that, I went there. As someone looking at it from the US, everything’s flipped. That’s confusing.
“It’s also very small, the road. It’s not at all like the roads here.
“There was no division between the lanes and there’s a quick turn with no warning.
“The police officer who was with me told me about how dangerous the road is.”
S c ot t i sh Gov er nment ministers have pledged to dual the A9 for decades, with the latest promise to widen the stretch between Perth and Inverness made in 2011.
Despite the Government
surprised that your driver’s licence can just work here, that you can just jump on a plane from the US and rent a car and be driving with everything completely reversed from what you’re used to, just all on good faith that you’re going to be able to wing it.”
Chris’s concerns have been supported by Fergus Ewing who is the MSP for Inverness and Nairn and sees the A9 run through much of his constituency. The ex- government minister has criticised his SNP colleagues for delays to the upgrade.
He voted against his Government on Wednesday in a vote on dualling the road and said he will “most likely” be disciplined. He told the Sunday
Mail: “This is utterly unacceptable. If I go to my constituents in the Highlands and say, ‘ Well, we’ll do it by 2050,’ they will say, ‘ Well, you’re out,’ and they’d be quite right because this is my job. The positive news is that the industry says there are the people and the companies that can do the work, they want to do the work. There just needs to be a total change in the way the procurement is done.”
Ewing said he has secured an agreement in principle from the petitions committee this week to hold an inquiry, to “work out what went wrong and, more importantly, how we put it right and get the job done ASAP”.
He has been working alongside Scottish Labour’s Rhoda Grant and
Scottish Conservative Murdo Fraser.
Fraser revealed he had been involved in a collision on the A9 in 1990, spending weeks in hospital with multiple fractures.
He said: “More people will die this year, and next year, and the one after, as this SNP promise is not delivered.” Transport Scotland was asked to respond to the criticism.
A spokesman refer red to c omments made by Gilruth on February 8, when she told MSPs the Scottish Government had an “unwavering commitment to del ivering the benef its of the completed A9 dualling programme”.
She sa id dua l l ing would “fundamentally improve road safety on the A9, as well as the lives of people who live in communities alongside the route”.
She added: “The Scot t ish Government’s resolute commitment to full dualling of the A9 remains absolute.”
I’m surprised your driver’s licence can just work here on good faith