Alton Coach Crash

One man has died and three others are critically injured after a horrific coach crash near Alton Towers theme park, in Staffordshire this week.

The passengers of the coach had been making their journey back to Peterborough, after a day at the theme park. The crash happened in the nearby village of Alton, where the quiet roads are not designed for large vehicles.

Investigators are now looking into what caused the crash, which involved a coach full of migrant workers careering through a wall and down a drop into a garden. Police believe that the bus had not managed to get around a sharp bend in the village.

The passengers on the bus, from the Peterborough area, included 28 people from Poland and 17 from Lithuania. They were all working as fruit and strawberry pickers based at Lutton Farm in Northamptonshire. There were also passengers from Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and a man from South Africa on the coach.

A total of 7 people are still being treated in hospitals across the West Midlands. Ambulance chiefs said each of the 71 passengers on board who survived the crash were treated for some sort of injury.

Neil Lorimer, of Shropshire firm Lanyon Bowdler has previous experience of representing victims from coach crashes with an international dimension and, is also a member of the Pan-European Organisation of Personal Injury Lawyers. PEOPIL seek to improve cooperation and knowledge between different European legal systems.

He commented, “Injuries to passengers, including trauma, are likely to range from the minor, through a number of moderate injuries to the very severe. Passengers may well have incurred or incur medical expenses including repatriation, suffer loss of earnings, require assistance with day to day tasks or have other more complex needs.

This case is likely to raise some complex issues on applicable law and in which country any court action for compensation can be brought, given that all passengers and the coach operator are of different nationalities.”