999 crews tell of a scene of motorway carnage

One woman died and a further 20 were injured – seven seriously – when a lorry hit a minibus travelling along the westbound carriageway of the M62.

The group of 21 women had been on their way to Liverpool from South Elmsall in West 
Yorkshire, as part of a hen celebration.

But just 12 miles into their trip, close to junction 32, disaster struck.

The brute force of the collision shunted the minibus off the carriageway and down a grassy bank where it came to rest on its side on the slip road below. The lorry also overturned in the smash.

The lorry driver was arrested in connection with the incident and was last night in custody.

Dave Walton, assistant chief officer for West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: “There was a lot of debris and people lying outside the vehicle, by the roadside.

“This is where firefighters’ training kicks in, but at the end of the day they are human beings and they are not immune.”

With the Yorkshire Air Ambulance grounded for planned maintenance work, helicopters from other providers across the north were dispatched to the M62 to take the injured women to various hospitals.

Kevin Hodgson, director of operations at Great North Air Ambulance, said: “We tasked one of our aircraft to the scene. Once they arrived they requested our second aircraft.”

One helicopter took a casualty to Leeds General Infirmary, 
while another flew to the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough with a patient on board.

Two aircraft from North West Air Ambulance and two from Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire Air Ambulance were also involved.

A spokeswoman for Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust said: “Due to the scale of the incident we enacted our major incident plan and dispatched a significant number of resources to the scene including ambulances, our hazardous area response team, doctors and air ambulances.”

Leeds General Infirmary’s emergency department took seven of the most critical patients who were treated for spinal, abdominal and lower limb injuries. Some planned operations were postponed.

A spokesman said: “Staff in a variety of specialties have been working in a co-ordinated way to treat these casualties.

“As a result of the incident some planned theatre sessions at the 
infirmary were cancelled for a time but these have now resumed.”

People were asked to go to accident and emergency at St James’s Hospital while LGI dealt with the incident.

Dr David Macklin, from Yorkshire Ambulance Service, added: “The crews as you can imagine faced a very difficult scene with multiple seriously injured people. They are trained to respond to those sorts of incidents, they reacted in a manner in which I would expect them to.”

Chartered accountant Pritpal Singh, who was among the motorists caught up in tailbacks after the incident, described a “sombre” mood among other drivers.

Mr Singh, 28, was returning to his office in Leeds city centre when he was forced to come to a halt in a queue about half a mile from junction 32. After waiting in their vehicles for about half an hour, he said drivers started to drift out onto the carriageway.

He said: “It was really sombre, I think everyone realised it was very serious.”

After walking up to the crash site, Mr Singh said there were as many as 15 ambulances, as well as the same number of police cars and several fire engines.

“In the midst of all the emergency vehicles I could just about see the scene of the accident,” he said.

“I could see a minibus which was on its side. It had quite a severe amount of damage on the right hand side. The lorry which had collided with it was on the main motorway.”

Police confirmed an off-duty officer was the first person to report the accident and had stayed at the scene to help. Witnesses are asked to call police, who are investigating what caused the crash, on 101.