Video – watch as lorry causes chaos, crashing into cars in Warwickshire pub car park
HORRIFIED pub customers watched in disbelief as a runaway liquid gas tanker rolled into five parked cars.
The shocking incident happened at The Three Horseshoes in Wixford on Sunday around 1pm, while the place was packed with punters.
CCTV footage shows the Calor tanker rolling through the car park and smashing into the vehicles including a Porsche Cayman and Tesla.
The driver, who’d parked a little further up the hill, is seen holding his head in his hands, as he surveys the wreckage.
Conroy Massingham, who owns The Three Horseshoes, was busy serving when it happened. He told the Herald: “The first I knew about it was when a customer sitting by the window shouted: ‘That lorry’s just hit someone’s car!’”
Conroy rushed out to find one of them was his own Porsche, while another was his mum’s Tesla, which he fears is “probably a write-off”.
Another car belonging to a friend who helps out at the family-run pub was “completely squashed”. The other two damaged cars belong to a customer and a delivery driver.
It’s not known exactly what caused the lorry, which was delivering gas to the pub, to start moving after it had been parked up. One onlooker suggested the handbrake wasn’t fully on. But the driver, said to be “very shaken”, claimed “the brake was faulty.”
The lorry, which was slightly damaged at the front, was later towed away.
Conroy said: “My car got off pretty lightly, compared to some of the others but it’s still going to cost a fair bit.
“It was the talk of the restaurant for the rest of the day and all the customers coming in were asking what had happened, after seeing the state of the cars outside.”
He added: “I don’t know how it [the lorry] started rolling down, because you can see it looks like it’s OK and doesn’t move anywhere when he gets out of the cab and walks all the way down to the pub and then it starts moving – that’s the weird thing. We’re very lucky that the customers who were out there were able to avoid it because it would have been really bad if someone had got hit by that.
“There were two customers who were just walking across the car park to the door but luckily, they’d got close enough to the door, so it didn’t actually hit them.
“It was a bit scary – they must have been terrified.”
Emmanuelle Neyret, who works part-time at the pub, told how the truck crashed into the Tesla which was parked right outside the office, where she was working. She said: “I heard this loud noise and thought something was crashing through the window of the office so I was really scared. I quickly ran outside because I was worried there were customers out there.
“Afterwards, one of our regular customers was upset and stressed out because he couldn’t stop thinking that if he hadn’t stayed in the pub for one more coffee, he would have been in the car park at that exact moment and in the path of the truck.”
The drama happened after the driver had finished filling the liquid gas tank. Emmanuelle added: “One of the first things I asked the driver after the crash was ‘Are you OK?’ and then ‘Have you got any gas left in the truck?’ because if it had been damaged you think of leakage and I know liquid gas is a very dangerous thing. We all feel so sorry for the driver, because he was in pieces.
A spokesperson for Calor said: “We are aware of an incident with one of our delivery vehicles that took place in a customer car park in Wixford on Sunday 21st January.
“Investigations are ongoing into the cause and we have been in touch with all parties involved.”
