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Fatal Accident leads to Blind-Spot safety call

19 April 2007

A coroner is calling for LGVs to be fitted with extra mirrors to eliminate the blind spot below the front of cabs after a pensioner was run over by a truck in slow-moving traffic. Victor Round says he has dealt with only three deaths in 25 years caused by LGV drivers not seeing pedestrians, but believes there could be many more non-fatal accidents. Now Round is writing to the Road Haulage Association to see what can be done. The RHA's Mike Farmer says it supports anything that assists with road  safety and has no objection to fitting mirrors to new vehicles, but retrofitting could be costly and difficult.

Round says: "[The RHA] may have its reasons, but I'm not impressed with the difficulties of retrofitting. Surely it's not difficult to fit something just above the windscreen?" In the latest death, in Worcestershire, Round says the police provided the family of the 77-year-old man with a scale drawing of what the LGV driver would have been able to see: "The driver was very lucky the family said 'poor chap, of course he couldn't see anything'."


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