A HEAVY goods vehicle smashed into Boronia RSL last week, its battered driver’s cabin slamming into a wall just metres from the building’s front door.
The accident happened at about 9.10am on Wednesday, 5 April when the vehicle was travelling south on the outside lane of Dorset Road.
The male driver attempted to pull into the inside lane after passing a decelerating truck when he caught sight of a small, almost stationary truck which was about to pull into the RSL entrance.
To avoid a collision with the truck in front, the driver steered his vehicle off the road through a narrow gap between the two trucks.
In doing so, he ripped a Give Way sign from a telegraph pole as he braked, mounted the kerb and bounced at speed onto the access ramp of the RSL.
The front of his vehicle collided at an angle with the RSL’s front wall and a perpendicular wall, with the front left wheel landing on the ramp about one metre from the ground.
The driver, who wished only to be identified by his first name, Derek, was shaken but unhurt.
“Talk about threading the needle,” he said of the near miss between truck and telegraph pole.
“It was a choice of this or clean (the driver in the front truck) up. I would have pushed him to God knows where. I could have pushed him into oncoming traffic,” he said.
Boronia RSL vice-president Maurie Burton was in the RSL at the time, metres away from the point of impact as he fetched a screwdriver from the front office.
“I thought the whole wall was going to come down,” he said.
Mr Burton was not injured but declared the front wall would need to be pulled down after surveying the damage.
Douglas Street resident Caroline Morrison arrived on the scene soon after the collision and said accidents were not rare on the stretch of road.
“Knox council keeps saying this is one of the safest roads in Knox. Well I can tell you we have an accident here every bloody week. We need to have some sort of road that can take these heavy lorries away from Dorset Road,” she said.
Senior Constable Dale Andrews of Boronia police said the driver appeared to have chosen ‘the lesser of two evils’ in steering his vehicle off the road.
He said the driver would be issued with a penalty notice for following another vehicle too closely.
– Ed Merrison
