DD has been stuck on the M5 for 6 hours

[GinForBreakfast]

I know there's been a serious incident but you can't leave people stuck on a motorway for 6 hours. That will include elderly people and tiny children. In other countries they manage to clear the roads far quicker.

No sign of anything moving and even once she does she's still 4 hours from home.

That’s a high bar but you have a solid case…

there are so many absolute dickheads on this thread it’s astounding. From the “just turn round” or the car abandoner above, through a raft of “it’s not good enough”, assuming the emergency services are just doing this for shits and giggles, and then a touch of “suicides are selfish” just for good measure.

when we wonder what type of person drives round a closed road because they don’t think it applies to them, or complains when an ambulance working on a patient is blocking their route, they are the type that we see on this thread!

It makes no difference if those people are Chinese, black, white, whatever and I didn’t say it did!

Tell me that you don't know the difference between xenophobia and racism without telling me that you don't know the difference between xenophobia and racism.

Summary: racism is "eww, brown people" and xenophobia is "eww, foreigners".

And now someone’s managed to blame it all on immigration!

I just…. Ffs

What an inconvenience for you daughter - however back in the real world, someone is severely injured following a car accident, I bet the first thing on their mind is that your poor daughter is held up for a few hours

You do realise that British people have children and these children grow up to need homes and services? There has been insufficient new houses built for decades, resulting in ever-increasing rents and house prices. Same for investment in public services. Nothing to do with foreigners and everything to do with bad planning policy.

The reason why you are only noticing it now is the previous 14 years of Tory rule maintained an unsustainable status quo and now Labour are grasping the nettle and overhauling planning policy to allow for the building of much-needed and long-needed houses, at which point the Tory press are whinging. I saw that headline about "bulldozing the Home Counties" and I recognise it for the NIMBY propaganda it is.

Go look up the meaning of "suppressed demand".

You don't get to speak to me like that!!

I am far from "stupid".

I won't tell you what I think of you because I like posting on this site.

Many of those skilled visa holding immigrants will be contributing towards those much-needed services. The NHS runs on skilled immigrants.

MN is really not the place to come to for support. You’re honestly better off messaging a friend or family member these days

You can absolutely come for support with real, solvable problems. Relationships is full of threads where women have real, solvable problems their husbands and other women help them solve those problems.

There's nothing we can do about a major incident on the M5.

Exactly. That’s why the OP should have had a moan to a mate or a family member instead

I am glad this incident is being thoroughly investigated to either rule out or rule in foul play.

What if the teenager was one of the missing children from this region or further afield? We know the poor girl was a teenager, but, right now, I don't think her age has been released. What if she wasn't alone? What did any witnesses see? If another vehicle made contact with her on the tarmac, the driver will need to be interviewed but may be shocked her/himself. It's a huge job to do all this and collect every last piece of potential forensic evidence, and then to get the lanes flowing again.

How does that make it ok? Only one girl tried to commit suicide and is hospitalized. You seem to realize that that one individual's situation is a tragedy. But as long as the majority of commuters are ok, others who suffer a medical emergency due to being stuck in traffic don't even rate a mention?

I agree completely. Unless there's suspicion that she was pushed, what are they investigating? I'm in the US, so maybe things are done differently there, but I don't understand closing every lane of a main thoroughfare all day for a jumper, especially a jumper who is alive and in the hospital. Where I live, even when there's a fatal accident, police try to quickly open at least one traffic lane, while investigators and medical personnel continue to work.

I would. There will be a few cars just left

How can they rule out her being pushed without investigating?

This is why we have hard shoulders: so that ambulances can get to stuck drivers who suffer medical emergencies.

I hope any abandoned cars are towed and crushed.

They would be towed. And the driver probably finned. But you can’t expect that people will just sit in their cars for 6 hours. There will be people with medical conditions that don’t have a choice.

What’s disgraceful is the state of our motorways (and the general behaviour of drivers which causes a lot of the accidents but that’s a totally different issue for another day )

The lights have been turned off on a large portion of our part of the M1 , it’s full of potholes and lane closures on the smart motorway are slow when there’s an accident. It’s pure incompetence but they’ll blame it on lack of funding.

Our little country is broken and it’s quite sad. Hope your DD is keeping warm and safe.

There are also no measures in place to stop dangerous driving on motorways. Use the bloody cameras in place to fine these drivers if there aren’t enough police cars to patrol the roads.

Traffic backs up extremely quickly.

When the incident occurs the emergency services have to get all the info, action crews to attend, drive to the incident and assess it which takes time. Meanwhile cars are continuing on the roads unaware and become stuck.

Even when warnings of lane closures/accident ahead etc drivers just continue on either oblivious to the warning or thinking that it won't be that bad etc

Have you seen the size of France in comparison to the uk? Our populations are of a similar size. I lived in France and Germany and Belgium. Major cities get pretty snarled up. It is likely it would take a similar amount of time on the stretches of motorway as heavily used as the British ones.

In my country we once had a 2 day one. Food and water vans were driving up along the hard shoulder continuously. Finally some bright spark realised it would be a good idea to start turning around the people at the back onto the other side( think they had to knock down a barrier) and then direct people back they whey they had come from. Was cleared in hours. People are stupid sometimes. Obviously the people didn't get where they wanted to go that day but at least they could go home or to a motel.

This is why I don't travel with out some food, water, my meds (us chronically ill people are wise to always have travel meds/daily meds etc!!), sheewee/toilet stuff, blanket etc.

I used to get laughed at in my late teens/early 20s that we always had an emergency kit in the car but it's been used multiple times in the years I've owned a vehicle!