Falling street lamp ‘smashed into parked car and narrowly missed dad and son inside’
A dad is fighting a council for compensation after part of a lamp post fell on his car — narrowly missing his 12-year-old son in the back seat.
Emmanuel Offor was parked near a shopping centre when the street furniture suddenly crashed onto the back roof of his Volkswagen.
Mr Offor, 43, and his son Toochi were showered with flying glass and he believes the falling metal could have killed a passer-by.
They had stopped in a council car park in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, on a trip to buy Toochi shoes to match his outfit for his baptism a few hours later at the nearby Parish Church of Christ the King.
Mr Offor said: ‘We were having a discussion about what shoes we were going to buy and there was a loud sound, it was like a bomb going off.
‘We were covered with glass and the roof of the car was weighed down because the metal was so heavy. The lamp post was very tall, it must have been around 30ft. My son was covered with glass and shards of metal.
‘This light came down very near to where his head was.
‘We had to be really careful when we took his clothes off and removed the sharp objects from his body.
‘It was meant to be a happy day for my son’s baptism but we had to cancel the party and it turned out to be a very sad day.
‘But it is not just about us, the weight of this falling metal could have killed anyone who was passing by.’
Mr Offor, a law student at Strathclyde University, was in the driver’s seat with his then wife beside him and his son, now 14, in the back left seat when the lamp fell. He immediately phoned the police, who directed him to South Lanarkshire Council. A council worker removed the metal from the car, which had been parked near The Regent Centre in Low Patrick Street, before giving the family a lift home.
The Jetta was written off but the father-of-two had to pay £375 in excess to his insurers and only received £3,000 for a vehicle he originally paid around £11,000 for in finance over four years.
He wants the council to take responsibility and provide compensation for the accident on September 25, 2021.
Mr Offor, from Blantyre, filled in a claims form where he said that all three suffered headaches as a result of the incident.
They arrived late at the baptism and had to cancel the party because they felt unwell and had no transport.
The local authority passed the matter on to an external claims service provider around a month later and there has been no resolution to date.
‘Any one of us could have been killed by that amount of falling metal, especially if we’d been standing by the side of the car,’ Mr Offor said.
‘As it is, my son had the fright of his life and we have suffered the stress and the injury and I am still at a financial loss.
‘The council is refusing to accept liability, it feels like a fight between a dog and an elephant as I am fighting the council’s whole legal team.
‘I have since passed my complaint on to my insurance company’s legal team but they say the council is not accepting liability because I have to prove the council was at fault. But I want the council to take responsibility, not just for our sake, but because this is about public safety.’
A spokesperson for South Lanarkshire Council said: ‘We are aware of this unfortunate incident and sympathise with Mr Offor and his son.
‘We are, however, unable to comment further at present on this particular case, given the ongoing legal proceedings.’
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