Landslip caused by recent heavy rains in Dorset - Couple perished 7 days ago - just discovered by emergency services
www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/9405659/Couple-lay-dead-for-up-to-week-in-car-after-tunnel-landslide.html
Not a pleasant way to meet your final days/hours.
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Very unlucky to have been exiting the tunnel just as the slide happened! - 10 seconds either way could have been all it needed. Nice of the Ghouls to take the Kids on a day out to view the death scene!
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They had been missing for a week apparently. I guess if there was a pile of muck from a landslip and no indication of a car underneath they were found when the repairs began.
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>> They had been missing for a week apparently.
>> I guess if there was a pile of muck from a landslip and no indication of a car underneath they were found when the repairs began.
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The details are here
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-18872203
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On the news, it says the car was crushed, (pictures show it to be severely crushed) so I guess they died pretty quickly. Talk about fate!
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Unlucky - according to the evening news some questions being asked why they weren't found sooner...
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>> according to the evening news some questions being asked why they weren't found
>> sooner...
>>
...Wondered how long it would take the armchair experts to appear.
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Just repeating what was said on the news from the comfort of my sofa !
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Coppers - even retired ones - always get twitchy when bodies have been lying about undiscovered.
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Well I must say looking at the clip the first thing I would have said was. " Good job a car was not coming out of the tunnel at the time. " The debris does not look very deep.
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- always get twitchy when bodies have been lying about undiscovered.
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There have been plenty of cases in the news over the years where I've felt half a job was done...and cannot fathom why a more professional job wasn't forthcoming... and I'm more than aware that for example, the civilianisation of posts in control rooms for financial reasons has been a major backward step with regards proper experience and knowing the right thing to do.......however, in this case it's a matter of extreme bad luck, that's all...unless I've missed something.
If there was no hint that there was a car under a pile of earth, on a little used road in the middle of nowhere...then what more in reality would have been done.
It seems like the missing persons investigation has narrowed down their route and then used mobile phone technology to narrow down their last location...which coincided with the location of the mudlside or thereabouts...and someone has then thought "Oh ****, we'd better take a more thorough look".
Oh to have the hindsight knowledge of an armchair warrior (not and never aimed at RP by the way, he was just the messenger).
Last edited by: VxFan on Thu 19 Jul 12 at 00:42
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>> Unlucky - according to the evening news some questions being asked why they weren't found
>> sooner...
Judging by pictures I doubt outcome would have been different if a witness had called 999 as the earth slid.
Easy to be wise after but they were some way from their home area; any search would have had a wide focus.
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My thoughts as well. It would have been an instantaneous death one would imagine.
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Extremely sad, but so are many other things including our (all/most of us here) families who will have suffered traumas we wish could have been avoided.
If that doesn't sound quite right I apologise. 'Tas been a strange day.
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Telegraph report says
"A man and a woman were left to die after being buried alive in a landslide when council officials and emergency services decided to close off a road without clearing the pile of mud and earth.
A county council spokesman said officials from its highways department had attended the scene along with Dorset fire and rescue service and police on July 7.
After an "initial assessment" was carried out the road was closed. But the couple remained trapped in their car and may have died after being unable to free themselves. "
I bet G4S are glad they did not have a contract to do anything in this case.
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>> I bet G4S are glad they did not have a contract to do anything in this case.
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Sorry John. Their contract is to do nothing so as they did they must be paid.
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According to the news the Fire Service rocked up and scanned the mudslide with a thermal imaging camera just to be sure, and found nothing, no car, no bodies.
If you see the car you will see why and how this happened, the car is squashed flat, right under the deepest part of the slide furthest away from access.
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The BBC report doesn't mention the type of car, but I doubt it matters. Even the biggest and safest modern cars are designed to cope with collisions with static objects or with things of their own mass or maybe one order of magnitude more. This would have been more like a mouse being trodden on by an elephant.
Comments like 'left to die' imply that something else could and should have been done, which seems grossly unfair. This was just really, really bad luck. That happens sometimes.
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>> Comments like 'left to die' imply that something else could and should have been done,
>> which seems grossly unfair. This was just really, really bad luck. That happens sometimes.
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Quite agree. I'm willing to be that the emergency services staff are horrified.
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Sounded like the landslide had crushed the car to me. Not looked at the news but they had earlier found one body and expected to find another. Terrible accident all the same.
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As for: "Even the biggest and safest modern cars are designed to cope with collisions with static objects or with things of their own mass"
Cars are not designed to withstand tonnes of soil/rock falling on top of them. Crash structures in car irrelevant. Someone will say a Volvo would have been better...
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>> Cars are not designed to withstand tonnes of soil/rock falling on top of them. Crash
>> structures in car irrelevant.
TG recently paid tribute to SAAB. Part of the article showed how strong the roof structure was.
youtu.be/d8PT91JWljQ?t=10m33s
Whether it could also cope with a landslide, who knows?
Last edited by: VxFan on Wed 18 Jul 12 at 01:28
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Not even close. That was my point about order of magnitude. Those Saab roof pillars were designed to take the car's own weight in a rollover, or to keep out a couple of tonnes of mobile venison. Caught between, what - 200 tonnes of moving hillside and the unyielding ground...
Didn't mean this to become ghoulish. It may be some comfort to the families to think that the couple in the car must have known little or nothing of what happened, and that the emergency services did all they could by finding and recovering the bodies.
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Telegraph reports: "The vehicle was crushed the roof was completely flat and we found at least one body inside and suspect amongst the mud there is a second body inside the car."
"left to die"?? I think not. Killed instantly, and presumably "at least one body inside" means that what they have found is bits.
A busy period for West Country fire and rescue and other emergency services. In my view they were better doing exactly as they did by tending to the problems of the living rather than trying to extract the bodies of the dead from very unstable and dangerous circumstances.
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>> Telegraph reports: "The vehicle was crushed the roof was completely flat and we found at
>> least one body inside and suspect amongst the mud there is a second body inside
>> the car."
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>> "left to die"?? I think not. Killed instantly, and presumably "at least one body inside"
>> means that what they have found is bits.
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>> A busy period for West Country fire and rescue and other emergency services. In my
>> view they were better doing exactly as they did by tending to the problems of
>> the living rather than trying to extract the bodies of the dead from very unstable
>> and dangerous circumstances.
>>
+1. I'd expect a better standard of reporting from the Telegraph - 'left to die' is the sort of lie we expect from the Mail.
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Expected from The Mail, who rarely disappoint!
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The Telegraph report does not say they were 'left to die'.
It does, quite reasonably, carry quotes from people who knew the couple asking why it took 10 days to find them.
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>> The Telegraph report does not say they were 'left to die'.
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>> It does, quite reasonably, carry quotes from people who knew the couple asking why it
>> took 10 days to find them.
>>
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It's reported as saying that by John H upthread as a direct quote. No doubt he can say when he saw it. As far as I can tell the Telegraph dies not print an article history allowing changes to the website to be traced back.
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>> The Telegraph report does not say they were 'left to die'.
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Not any more, it doesn't. But it did.
Search google quickly for " before their cache disappears:
"A man and a woman were left to die after being buried alive in a landslide when council officials"
see here
lifestyle.topnewstoday.org/health/article/2818764/
lifestyle.topnewstoday.org/style/article/2818116/
Last edited by: John H on Wed 18 Jul 12 at 11:12
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>> The Telegraph report does not say they were 'left to die'.
No. But it does have a headline saying" Couple buried for 10 days and police blame 'a busy weekend' ".....which somewhat infers some wrongdoing, neglect or unnecessary excuses.
What the ACC (Assistant Chief Constable) actually said was "It was a busy weekend, there are no obvious signs of a vehicle buried in the mud, there are several hundred tons of mud and rubble, and there are no reports of missing people in the area".
Further to that the fire brigade had searched the are with a thermal camera, prior to the authorities deciding to close the road and let things settle before tackling the mudslide, as the site was still unstable.
Shoddy journalism is shoddy journalism. It's what you have come to expect of the red tops and the Daily Wail, not the broadsheets like The Telegraph.
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...Shoddy journalism is shoddy journalism...
It's reporting a side to the case you don't like, but that doesn't make it shoddy.
The report, certainly as it comes up now, carries fulsome quotes from the ACC and the ignorant *** who pay his wages, sorry, members of the public who have questions to ask.
Last edited by: VxFan on Thu 19 Jul 12 at 00:42
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>> ...Shoddy journalism is shoddy journalism...
>>
>> It's reporting a side to the case you don't like, but that doesn't make it
>> shoddy.
It is shoddy, most shoddy.
Whether I like it or not has nothing to do with it. I read that sort of paper to get a factually correct report on what is going on. I don't want spin or sensationalism or half baked reporting to make a good headline.
The journalists on The Telegraph are intelligent enough and with it enough to know this...and the paper should know better.
It is why I'm prepared to pay £1.20 for my morning paper, rather than 20p. If they choose to dumb it down too much, i'll stop buying it. Simple as that.
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>>>> The report, certainly as it comes up now, carries fulsome quotes from the ACC and
>> the ignorant *** who pay his wages, sorry, members of the public who have questions
>> to ask.
>>
How about us non ignorant, who'd like the newspaper report to be straightforward. Don't we pay the ACC's wages as well and might we not have questions?....and...wouldn't the ignorant *** be reading something else?
Last edited by: VxFan on Thu 19 Jul 12 at 00:41
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>> >> The Telegraph report does not say they were 'left to die'.
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>> No.
No.
Yes, it did say 'left to die'.
www.telegraph.co.uk/search/?queryText=%27man+and+woman+left+to+die%27&Search=
Last edited by: John H on Wed 18 Jul 12 at 11:17
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>> Yes, it did say 'left to die'.
I saw it too.
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Even now (and it appears to have been well edited since I posted above) it says:
"Concerns were raised that the couple may have survived if emergency services had got to them sooner."
At best it appears this is wishful thinking on the part of the friends of the couple; at worst shoddy journalism.
Last edited by: Mapmaker on Wed 18 Jul 12 at 11:15
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I read the Telegraph article and it did originally say 'left to die'. But the original reports were all saying I think that a car had been found with two bodies. Only later did they start reporting the car had been crushed.
So it would seem the Telegraph assumed they were alive after the landslide but clearly they were not. And as said above, the fire brigade checked for signs of life with thermal cameras. If they were alive you'd hope the cameras were sensitive enough to pick them up. I would think they had more important things than to dig up the landslide - they might even have thought leave it so the tunnel is closed until someone inspects it.
Tragic loss of life - but accidents happen.
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Seems that there was possibly a review of the Missing Person case and some bright spark had the idea of looking under the landslide - I have some experience with a Mountain Rescue Team and how their search managment works - MRTs are brought in regularly with enquiries like this where they co-exist with Police Forces and they provide invaluable advice (and boots on the ground on occasions) but their back office functions are invisible to the public in general searches. May have been their input here as well.
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Oh and the ACC looks about 12.
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...Oh and the ACC looks about 12...
Sign of increasing age, so they say.
I'm beginning to think the same thing about newspaper editors.
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>> I'm beginning to think the same thing about newspaper editors.
>
Meet Judges from time to time even some of the High Court bench look young.
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...Meet Judges from time to time even some of the High Court bench look young...
Aye, judges and magistrates is another one.
Although there's been a drive in recent years to get younger people on the bench, so maybe they've succeeded.
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Some tinpot parish counceller quoted in the Mail report as being irate and appalled that the couple were not found and extricated alive.
Some just have to shoot their mouth off and criticise anyone and everyone. It doesn't say how he got his spade out to shift ' several hundred tons '.
My guess is he didn't !
Happens all over the world, mudslides/rockslides/trees falling on people/etc.
It won't stop happening....that's life...sadly.
Ted
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As Wstpig says -armchair warriors.
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He'd soon scream and shout if they were diverted from pumping out his flooded basement, to search and move every landslip, just in case.
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Telegraph has been a funny mix of dumb and not-dumb for years. I expect they have quite a lot of readers who would be at home with the Mail.
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>> Telegraph has been a funny mix of dumb and not-dumb for years. I expect they
>> have quite a lot of readers who would be at home with the Mail.
>>
I think you're right. The Mail dumbed down some years ago, to grab some red top readers. The loyal stayed with it and it is now what it is....i.e. red top all but the colour of the front page.
The Telegraph has shifted a bit towards what the Mail was. Shame really, I want my news as straight as possible.
Last edited by: Westpig on Wed 18 Jul 12 at 14:31
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Car buried in Dorset Landslip - 2 x deaths - devonite
