EMERGENCY services have urged road users to consider the safety of others, after yet another life was lost on the region’s roads.
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Paramedics, SES, police and CFA members worked for three hours to save a man after the car he was driving ran off the road and into a tree at Fogartys Gap Road, near Maldon, on Thursday.
The 46-year-old Baringhup man was airlifted to The Alfred hospital, where he later died of his injuries.
May has been marred by a number of serious crashes, including a fatality at Neilborough; a single-car crash on the Calder Highway at Big Hill; and a collision involving a van and a motorbike in Maiden Gully.
The state’s road toll stands at 86 – a 14 per cent decrease on 2017.
“Every single time someone is killed on the road, the ripple effect doesn’t end,” Bendigo SES deputy controller Natalie Stanway said.
She said road trauma affected the loved ones of the people involved, emergency services, hospital staff, people first on scene, any witnesses, people living nearby…
“It just never ends,” Ms Stanway said.
“It will stay with them, one way or another, for a long time.”
She, Bendigo Highway Patrol Sergeant Mick McCrann, and CFA district 2 operations manager Bill Johnstone urged road users to do everything in their power to reduce the risk of road trauma.
“There’s kind of this attitude of she’ll be right… if I have a crash it’ll only impact me,” Ms Stanway said.
“But what about if you have a crash and you, [hypothetically], take out a family of five coming home from their holidays? What about if you have a crash and you force a school bus off the roads?
“How are you going to live with that for the rest of your life?”
Sergeant McCrann said he would ask motorists whether they would consider their behaviour on the roads acceptable if the safety of someone they cared for was at risk.
“Most people would say it’s not acceptable, and yet they engage in that behaviour,” he said.
He said it was not until some people had experienced an incident that they appreciated the true cost of risk on the roads.
“The cost of that driving behaviour is horrific. It’s beyond comprehension. So why engage in it?”
Mr Johnstone said the trauma emergency service members sustained from crashes was ‘significant’.
“Just about everyone would be touched by the road toll at some stage,” he said.
“While it has profound effects for those involved, for those who have to deal with it directly, quite often we are reminded just how precious life is and how easily it can be taken away, and that quite often it need not have happened”.
Are you fit to drive?
PREPARE for the depths of winter, police have warned motorists.
“We tend to get an increase in crashes with the change in weather,” Bendigo Highway Patrol Sergeant Mick McCrann said.
“Poorer driving to conditions leads to more people crashing on our roads.
“If you’re not driving to the conditions, then you’re putting yourself and everybody else at risk.”
There were a number of questions he encouraged motorists to consider:
“Let’s start with the beginning – am I in a fit state to drive? Is my vehicle roadworthy? What route am I going to take?”
He said people should consider what they might do if something unexpected happened as they were driving.
“Are you prepared to stop?”