By JESSE GRAHAM
IT’S a road that visitors love and residents fear.
Anyone who travels along the Maroondah Highway through the hills and up the Black Spur to Narbethong knows its winding corners and high speed limit make it a challenge for most drivers.
When the cold weather and rains hit in autumn and winter, it’s a nightmare for emergency services crews, who are often called out to multi-car crashes and others running off of the road.
On Monday, 27 April, the ambulance, SES, CFA and police were all called out to a crash a few kilometres past Selovers Lookout, where a 79-year-old Buxton woman drove off of the highway and crashed down an embankment.
The car went down two metres before hitting a tree and a stump, which crumpled in the car’s doors.
The driver was cut out of the car 40 minutes later and taken to Maroondah Hospital in a stable condition with neck and chest injuries and grazes.
The car was expected to be written off.
Healesville Police Leading Senior Constable Chris Grasby said that, according to a witness, the driver lost control and drove off the highway.
He said it was the latest in a long string of crashes and accidents on the stretch of road leading to the spur, near the water tanks on the highway.
More troubling still was the fact that, according to LSC Grasby, crashes going up the spur were becoming more common than drivers crashing on the way to Healesville, where speed was often a factor.
“When you’ve got people coming off of the road driving up the hill, we’ve eliminated speed as a factor,” LSC Grasby said.
“Obviously, there’s something that’s not right with the road – it used to be people coming down the spur, but in the last 18 months to two years, we’ve had a lot more go off coming up than coming down.”
LSC Grasby said a solution needed to be found.
“The road certainly needs to be looked at by an engineer or someone from VicRoads,” he said.
VicRoads Metro South East Region Director, Aidan McGann, said that VicRoads was aware of the concerns about the road, and told the Mail it had been assessed in April 2013 and again in March this year.
“Vicroads technical experts revisited the site to analyse the road surface and confirmed it to be in good condition,” he said.
“It’s clear that there is a trend of crashes occurring and our challenge is to continue investigating what may be causing this, and how we can prevent that trend.
“It may be a case of driving behaviour, or an underlying issue that needs more probing.”
Healesville SES Deputy Controller, Geoff Stott, said there were often crashes along the road, but said he thought the ratio was close to 50/50, in terms of driver direction, and sometimes due to heavy braking on corners.
“There is more of a tendency to keep your foot on the brakes, which skids you off of the road,” he said.
Proposals have been raised by emergency services members for guard rails on the left-hand side of the road towards Narbethong, but opinions are divided on their benefits and their risks to drivers.
Mr McGann said that VicRoads policies on establishing guard rails tried to balance the risks and benefits, and so were hard to implement on Maroondah highway.
“In terms of providing guard rails, or wire safety rope barriers, they are installed two to three metres away from the traffic lanes to allow a stopped vehicle to be clear of traffic,” he said.
“However, this isn’t always possible due to the proximity of vegetation or the edge of the road formation – wire rope barriers are also designed to minimise the risk of vehicles bouncing back onto the road.
“Across the Black Spur, we have installed guard rails and made other road safety improvements, and we will continue to investigate further options to provide a safer road.”
In the meantime, Mr McGann said road users needed to be wary of the conditions they drove in, especially on wet roads.
What do you think? Have you had trouble on the highway before, or do you have suggestions for drivers tackling the Healesville-Narbethong stretch? Send a letter to the editor to editor@mailnewsgroup.com.au or to 244 Maroondah Highway, Healesville, 3777.
