First of all I apologise if this is in the wrong place, or if it sounds like I’m trying to teach Granny how to ■■■■ eggs.
If you don’t know, I work in one of the HA’s control rooms, you professional guys (& Galls) out there often are / can be a great help to us when there’s an incident, but I’d like to expand on something if I may.
On a recent shift, the police had a call from an HGV driver who’s spotted something out of the corner of his eye as he passed, in fact his was the only call on the incident, as due to the high vantage point in the cab, he saw what car drivers couldn’t. Unfortunately he’d passed the incident before realising and therefore couldn’t stop to assist, he did however call it in on 999. His best location was similar to “I joined at junction ## and had been travelling for only a couple of minutes”
From his information the police & us worked out that it would put him right between 2 particular junctions, so we all concentrated on that stretch of motorway.
The incident itself was potentially very serious.
There were 3 police patrol, 3 HATO patrols, 2 fire engines, ambulance and paramedic car, and 2 ISU’s searching the verges and banking for over 6 miles. After nothing being found the search was widened and we found the incident some 6 miles further down. How serious it was, the motorway had to be closed for approx 3 hours whilst it was dealt with.
Ok, what am I getting at you’ll ask? I’m not knocking the driver, he did his best to explain where it was, but if he’d have known about Marker-post location things may have been a lot different, so…
I’ve noted all the discussions about having to stop to use the ERT etc with 40ft artic (which is the very best way), but I can appreciate the difficulty, however, over the last year or so, large marker posts have been erected on most motorways and A roads (I’ll not say all, just in case I’m wrong!) these were initially put up so that emergency services could still read the location whilst travelling at warp speed to get to an incident.
these are located ever ½ km, and tell us exactly where the problem is.
It means that the signals are set in the correct place, and not for miles, they can be set more appropriately with something better than “Incident”. It also means that emergency services know which junction etc to approach from.
If you saw something and couldn’t stop, call it in and all you’d need to do is say that it’s just before marker post " On the M25, B c/way at marker-post 43.8" it would then be a tremendous help in attending and clearing the incident as quickly as possible.
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