Howdy y'all and welcome China, Romania, France and the USofA...welcome to the blog...this short Sunday post is a slightly self-indulgent and fairly parochial localised effort...and tomorrow a continuation of the series of posts re the SAPol Anti-Corruption Branch 'raid' of my home on Thursday 8th May 2014...(and their initial brief visit the day before about 1430hrs-Ed)...quite...
Crunchy Penola Suite: yesterday 'round about noon I just happened to be walking El Poocho 30m from the Penola Rd/Wireless Rd intersection when I aurally witnessed a nasty accident...(aurally witnessed?-Ed)...had my back to the corner so heard but did not see 'screeeeech Crunch!'...and turned to see a Ford/Holden sedan pulling slowly away and drive up onto the footpath by the deli, and a smaller sedan sitting in the middle of the intersection with it's side stove in...
The young woman had turned right from Wireless Rd East, headed North, but apparently didn't see the oncoming larger silver/grey car going South, and the bigger sedan t-boned her right in the driver's door...
I told someone to call an ambulance and was the first person to get to the car on the footpath where they signalled that they were ok so I went out to the middle of the road...the passenger indicted that the driver was badly shaken but not specifically hurt...a bloke drove across from Wireless Rd East and cleverly placed his 4WD ute thingy to block traffic headed into town, and I directed traffic coming up the slope out of town to move to the inside lane.
An ambulance was there in minutes...(we were only 1km from the Mt Gambier hospital but that is still pretty good...they even beat the tow-truck, and that's something-Ed)...indeed...and eventually a police car, the State Emergency Service Rescue truck thingy, and 2 Metropolitan Fire Service trucks...sounds like overkill when all 4 people involved walked away from the accident after brief ambulance attention and chatting to the police, but this is procedure...and fair enough...
With 4 potential victims and 2 separate vehicles possibly on fire, it was an appropriate response and a mark of the society I want to live in...people acting instinctively and collectively to help others until the well-trained, well-equipped Rescue Services are able to attend ASAP...it was a minor miracle that the whole thing wasn't a whole lot worse...
And the socio-political failures that effectively guaranteed this accident and/or others like it, are very well documented...the intersection is a State government responsibility that allegedly doesn't meet the requisite traffic flow to justify lights or the far more sensible a bloody round-about...and what does the Labor state government spend $100,000s on instead? bike lanes, shreckin' bike lanes...
For the same cost as the ludicrous 200m of bike lanes recently installed along Penola Rd...(with associated re-guttering, re-bitumenising, night-time work penalty rates, etc-Ed)...exactly...for all that pointless bullshit and stuffin' about to put hugely problematic and barely used bike lanes in completely the wrong place, that time, effort, and expense could have produced a much needed round-about at an intersection that remains fatality free purely by luck...
More On This Later: Whilst any traffic management initiative and/or infrastructure is only as good as the morons using it...(present company excepted of course-Ed)...but of course...a round-about works perfectly well just up the road at the Penola Rd/Jubilee Hwy intersection so why not at Wireless Rd?...and it's more than just a good idea ignored, it's indicative of a disconnect between the morons making the decisions and the morons who then have to organise their lives around said original moronicisms...(that's a lot of moronicising-Ed)...yes, it's an exciting new weight loss initiative, Moronercise...
What Mt Gambier needs is a round-about at Penola Rd/Wireless Rd not stupid bike lanes and that was made perfectly clear to the government...it has been made perfectly clear for years nay decades that something must be done with that intersection...but what Mt Gambier clearly needs and clearly wants, is absolutely irrelevant
You know I do wonder sometimes if these people don't have a bad week then get pissed on a Friday arvo and sit around thinking of ways to bitch-slap Mt Gambier....ahhhahhah I know, lesh put bike lanesh on the bishiest bit but ignore the deadly problem jush up the road, ahahahhhahhhaaa...(you make a persuasive argument sir-Ed)...yesh, yesh I do...
In closing I'd just like to cover the Mt Gambier City Council's massive whinge about lack of consultation from the state government re the Penola Rd bike lanes that was immediately followed by Council doing exactly the same to local business owners and residents...(it really is quite unbelievable-Ed)...yeah, and now they're trying to pump it up as an Election issue heading into the November 2014 Local Government elections...(you know, they must think people are really, really stupid to come up with such a transparently vacuous confected conflict and try and make it fly-Ed)...
Council is absolutely desperate that people don't look a little more closely at some of the outrageous Budget justifications they came up with in 2013/14 and the gross mismanagement that represents, and the extraordinarily cavalier decisions they continue to make, casually throwing millions of rate-payers money about...better come up with a visible, daily distraction that they can refer to rather than address real issues...(it's Dodgy Politics 101-Ed)...indeed...
Tomorrow: Council Meeting Stuff
Sorry, I'll finish the Council stuff, then do the SAPol raid thing after that...
I am Nick Fletcher and this is my blog...cheers and laters...
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