A report was made to the council after Barrett’s fall, and the road was inspected on 31 December before being filled on 2 January.<\/p>\n
Walton initially told the hearing that a pothole that had been thought to have caused Barrett’s fall had been missed during the 1 December road inspection, because the inspector deemed it not deep enough to need filling in, but did not consider the lower threshold for potholes on pedestrian crossings.<\/p>\n
After reviewing dashcam images of the fall during his evidence, Walton clarified that Barrett had not tripped on that pothole, but on a less severe road defect that did not require repair.<\/p>\n
Walton said they were dealing with “multiple thousands” of calls about the conditions of the roads, which he said could deteriorate quickly due to the wet wintry weather.<\/p>\n
“We were dealing with unprecedented levels of demand,” he said.<\/p>\n
“There were a number of defects at the time which were not repaired during the KPI [key performance indicator] window.”<\/p>\n
In his conclusion, Hartley said: “The leading wheel of the three-wheeled frame became stuck in the road, which caused her to lose her balance and fall.<\/p>\n
“The defect thought to have been responsible was not in fact the cause of the fall.”<\/p>\n
The coroner added any defect “was not actionable at the point of the fall”, but said he would write to the county council and Via over concerns about not “having a process in place that allows them to triage [calls] made to them” about the condition of the roads.<\/p>\n
Hartley said he was concerned “there’s a future risk to others” and would issue a prevention of future deaths report to Nottinghamshire County Council, Via East Midlands and the UKRLG.<\/p>\n
The coroner said: “They do not appear to have a process in place that allows them to triage referrals alerting them to concerns about the state of the highways.”<\/p>\n
He said no review of the road Barrett fell on was done for 12 days, even though it was suspected she had tripped on a pothole.<\/p>\n
Hartley said there was no system to prioritise the most severe road defects for urgent inspection.<\/p>\n
He added that the UKRLG, which published a code of practice for managing roads, makes no specific recommendations about vulnerable pedestrians using walking aids with small wheels.<\/p>\n
Following the inquest’s conclusion, David Langford – director of highways, transport and waste management at the council – said: “Since this incident, we have been looking at the details of this case.<\/p>\n
“Once we have received the letter of recommendations from the inquest, we will work with colleagues at Via to undertake a thorough review of our policies and procedures, and look at ways to make improvements which may help to avoid similar incidents occurring in the future.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A report was made to the council after Barrett’s fall, and the road was inspected on 31 December…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":701985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-701984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/701985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}