Cyclist killed by six-inch deep pothole ‘would have survived if council fixed it’

A cyclist who suffered a fatal head injury after hitting a pothole ‘would still be alive’ if the local council had fixed the crack, a coroner has said.

Harry Colledge, 84, was flung into the air from his bike in Winmarleigh, a village of just 270 people in Lancashire, on January 2 this year.

But local officials claimed that the six-inch deep crack which killed the retired teacher closed up and then reopened all on its own.

At an inquest on October 13, the coroner heard how the pothole in Island Lane has long been a fixture of Winmarleigh.

The crack has been visible since March 2009, appearing on Google Street View, but highway operatives didn’t spot the ‘trench’ in the centre of the road when they were sent last September for repairs.

One worker admitted at the inquest they had been instructed to look for faults on the single-track road that would pose a threat only to four-wheelers.

Only 11 days later, Lancashire County Council (LCC) highways boss Robert Treen carried out an inspection and claimed he didn’t see the pothole.

‘I didn’t miss it, it must have been repaired,’ he told the inquest, adding it must have ‘closed up on its own’.

Lancashire area coroner, Kate Bisset, concluded that if the council had acted on warnings to fill in the 87-metre-long crack Harry would likely not have died.

Bisset said the council’s explanation that the crack – wide enough to hide a man’s hands – must have closed up before last year’s inspection was ‘wholly mystifying’.

She said Harry’s family was ‘well within their rights to feel outraged at the continual refusal of Lancashire county council to accept the glaringly obvious with regards to the ongoing presence of the crack’.

The coroner added: ‘The council’s position, maintained to the bitter end, was met by audible laughter in this court.

‘The unrealistic, unsustainable, and incomprehensible position adopted by the council with regards to the presence of the defect on Island Lane leaves me with little confidence that meaningful changes have taken place.’

Preston Coroner’s Court heard how Harry, a member of Cleveleys Road Club, had been riding with his friend Nigel Mycock when his front wheel became lodged in the crack.

Despite the best efforts of passers-by and paramedics, he later died at Royal Preston Hospital.

More than 300 people attended Harry’s funeral, where grieving locals described him as a ‘true gent’.

Collision investigator PC Glenn Hilton, from Lancashire Constabulary, told the inquest: ‘In my opinion, it was the front wheel of the bike going into the crack in the road which caused the cycle to suddenly come to an abrupt stop and throw the cyclist off the bike.’

Parish councillors had arranged for photographs of the pothole to be sent to highway bosses, but the four-person team didn’t spot it on September 15, 2022.

An independent highways maintenance expert told the hearing he was ‘not aware of any mechanism that would have caused that crack to be there on September 9, not be there on September 15 then return on January 2’.

Adrian Runacres, who has more than three decades of highway maintenance experience, said four parish and one county council workers failing to see the crack was ‘puzzling’.

Runacres said it would have ‘taken a considerable period of time’ for the defect to develop ‘to that magnitude’.

Alex Williams, who represented Harry’s family on behalf of charity Cycling UK, said the crack can only be described as a ‘trench’.

Treen’s suggestion was so ‘vanishingly rare’ it could be discounted entirely, Williams said.

According to the county council’s policy, a crack such as that on Island Lane should have been repaired within a maximum of 10 days.

Harry’s wife Val said that while the inquest verdict has given the grieving family some closure, the wound can be easily reopened.

‘To know that my husband Harry was killed by a deep crack on a country lane, which had been reported and should have been repaired, is not only devastating news [but] it makes me angry beyond word,’ she told LancsLive.

‘Every time I see a cyclist riding towards me my heart jumps and I’m right back by Harry’s bedside in the hospital, looking at his lifeless body and wondering how on earth something like this can have happened.’

Following the inquest, the county council’s chief executive Angie Ridgwell said: ‘We are aware of the Coroner’s findings in the inquest into the death into Mr Colledge.

‘Our thoughts and condolences are with Mr Colledge’s family, and we can assure them that we will be considering the findings of this inquest thoroughly and carefully.’

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