[Kevinl03]

Youths Throwing Bricks on M57 Motorway

Merseyside Police is investigating following an incident on the M57 motorway.

At about 7pm on Wednesday 14th July Merseyside received a number of calls that youths were throwing bricks at on-coming traffic on the M57 motorway at Whiston in Knowsley. Shortly after receiving these calls a road traffic collision occurred when a lorry was struck on the windscreen by a missile. The missile caused another vehicle, a Nissan Micra, to take avoiding action, subsequently colliding with the central reservation near to the location.

The incident entailed closing two lanes of the southbound carriageway and one man was removed to hospital with minor injuries.

Neighbourhood Inspector Shaun Holland said, "Recent events have highlighted the possible tragic consequences of such irresponsible behaviour and Merseyside Police are treating these incidents extremely seriously. Increased police patrols will be deployed in order to combat this dangerous behaviour. I would also like to remind parents to be are of where their children are and what they are doing during the light nights of the summer holidays."

Anyone who witnessed the incident or can identify the youths involved is asked to contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.


Source here.

[The Pheonix]

What?!

Do these people have no conscience or guilt?! What if the car they hit with a brick caused a fatality and then they found out it was a family relative?

Utterly disgusting. Something will have to be done about this, because it's just getting out of control. Perhaps installing netting at a cost of £XXX million to the tax payer? *shrug*

[Kevinl03]

Unfortunately Adam this type of thing is happening more and more frequently nowadays.

How best to deal with it is anyone's guess really.

[The Pheonix]

The only thing I can think of is to put tennis style netting 15ft high on both sides of every bridge, but I wouldn't be suprised if it ran into £billions.

I was going to take a more reserved view and suggest education of youngsters, but it's obvious that this won't work and, like you say, these incidents are becoming all too common.

[Kevinl03]

They would no doubt find some way round any netting that was put up.

With regard to policing the bridges, most of them are in the middle of fields in the middle of the countryside - the only police nearby would be those driving underneath from time to time.

[Pyrali]

The reason that we have built bridges across motorways without multi-million pound fences on all of them is because its unthinkable that anyone could ever do this... If it causes a fatality, its worse than murder in some senses, because when you throw that brick, knowing it could kill someone, you don't have any idea who it is, they never did anything to you...

[The Pheonix]

Policing bridges? What is the world coming to?! Yes, you're right, it'd be completely impractical anyway.

I just cannot think of a single way to combat the problem. Obviously you could have strengthened windscreens to resist hard objects, but at the end of the day, a brick on a motorway is just as serious. Also, I think people would go into shock after havign their car hit by falling bricks and panick anyway, no doubt causing accidents/fatalities.

[Kevinl03]

Close the bridges or knock them down??