Hi all,
I know I'm mostly preaching to mostly experienced people but wanted to remind you once more how easy things can go wrong.
Today there have been three accidents on the
Gibb River road, all within 10 km of each other. All ended up here one way or another.
Two lots of passengers had lucky escapes and only the vehicles are stuffed, no other vehicle was involved in those two crashes. Sounds like they just lost it and rolled.
The other was a vehicle comes round corner suddenly sees 2 pushbike riders.
Driver brakes, slides and wipes out both bikes.
The male bike rider is ok just some bark off, the lady is not ok and has just been airlifted from here by the RFDS. Hopefully she will be ok, has some broken bones, badly bruised etc, it could have been even worse.
This particular vehicle driver was an older man who has never before in his life had any accident at all BUT is from Europe and is inexperienced on gravel.
I can't say it often enough, your brakes will not work as expected on loose gravel !!!!! Driving on gravel is nothing like driving on bitumen !!!!!!
If you have to brake hard you WILL slide and lose control of the vehicle.
The other thing is I have noticed a lot in the last few years is there are now often pushbike riders on the GR road. When catching up to another vehicle you know it's ahead because of the dust, bikes are different thing altogether you have no idea they are there. Fine when you have even a small clear bit to see them ahead, different when you just happen to catch up to them, right on a corner.
I'm not excusing the accident , I'm just glad it's never been me rounding a sharp bend and finding pushbikes right there ahead of me.
Even a small accident will totally wreck your holiday, to say nothing of what a bad one could do.
There have been SO many stories again this year of vehicles out of control due to speed and inexperience.
Please take care, I really don't want to ever have to get the RFDS to airlift you or anyone else out of Drysdale.
cheers, Anne