No Such Thing as an Accident The Motorway: Life in the Fast Lane

232 miles of road carrying over 40 million vehicles a year,

the M6 is the longest and one of the busiest motorways in Britain.

24/7, 365, the M6 is solid every day of the year.

Outside Birmingham it meets four other motorways

and keeping them running is a constant battle

for time and resources.

There are 101 different jobs on this motorway

and yet not one motorist is aware of what we do.

A hidden army of men and women work day and night.

Have you ever laid down on the M6? I have.

-And I've played football on the M25!

-HE LAUGHS

Whatever the weather.

On the M5 you'll find your money. On the M50 you'll find the porn.

Every day they set out to control the chaos...

-HE SHOUTS

-Jesus!

..and to help us when things go wrong.

2-1, can I have an ambo, please?

Trying at all costs...

-..to keep Britain on the move.

-Oh, God!

Please! Ah! I think me tyre's blown!

They should call it the Mad 6 instead of the M6!

We're going to go onto the motorway.

You've had some experience with dual carriageways, sort of thing.

-Yeah.

-But today we're going to look at going into

bigger motorways, more lanes.

-This, you will find, will be a little bit different.

-OK.

A little bit more intense. All right.

What shall we talk about now?

I don't know.

We could talk about how people drive,

how bad they drive on the motorway.

Which way? Am I coming off? Am I staying...

-Staying on, aren't I? That must be a junction.

-Yeah.

-I can see better out of this mirror.

-Do we need a signal, do you think?

-Do you reckon?

-I think so. No, we signal going out, aren't we?

That's a confusing one.

Nearly there actually.

-TAP ON WINDSCREEN

-Argh!

-What was that?

-Something hit my windshield!

-THEY LAUGH

-What the hell was that?

-That just made me jump.

It made me jump!

At the West Midlands regional control centre

a team of Highways Agency traffic officers

monitor an 84-mile stretch of the M6.

I'm looking for an HGV, a car transporter,

which apparently has got a vehicle on the top of it

that could potentially strike a bridge.

During peak times,

up to 8,000 vehicles an hour use this section of motorway.

Part of the job here is to spot problems before they happen.

Hold on. I've got it!

65... Yeah, 5619.

The boot's open on the Mondeo at the front, I think.

-What?

-Yeah, mate. It's just coming down.

Bridges are a set height

and there is the potential that that could strike the bridge.

We're just worrying about it because if it does catch,

it could possibly dislodge the vehicle.

Just passing the slip, mate, from Corley.

It could rip off the actual boot of the car

and then that will end up on the carriageway and that,

obviously, would cause a secondary incident as a result.

-Come on.

-Is it on the move?

-Yes. It is lane one, mate.

Hold on. Keep coming, keep coming.

Yeah, mate. I'm just watching it on two.

See if it comes off at two. Indeed, it's off at two, off at two.

He has actually pulled over, mate.

Someone's brought something to his attention. He has stopped, mate.

Many years ago when I was here, at the same location,

brand-new Range Rover... I think it was a Range Rover Sport,

fell off the back of an actual HGV car transporter

and careered across the carriageway and luckily didn't hurt anyone.

Went onto the hard shoulder.

Every year in Britain there are more than 250,000

road traffic collisions, known as RTCs.

We see a lot of bad driving.

Driver behaviour, I think, causes a lot of the problem.

That's why we call them road traffic collisions instead of an accident.

Because there is always someone to blame.

Used to be the old RTA, now it's the RTC

because there's always someone at fault.

If you crash the car it could be weather-related,

it could be driver error, it could be car error.

There's always something or someone to blame.

No such things as accidents.

As well as attempting to prevent and respond to road traffic collisions,

the Highways Agency constantly looks to improve

sections of the motorway where RTCs happen more often.

They are clearing the debris before they let the traffic go.

We always get the blame for closing lanes and it's not us

that closes the lanes, it's the people who caused the accident!

Their current focus is on Catthorpe Junction at the start of the M6.

A busy interchange linking the motorway to the M1

and A14 trunk road.

It's our black spot area.

We tend to find that especially on the approach towards the M1,

that's where we have quite a few incidents,

purely because of the layout of the road.

At its centre is an unusual and outdated road layout,

called the dumbbells or teardrops, that's about to be redesigned.

Two roundabouts and this is the link

that gets you from the M6 to the A14 is this stretch of road here.

The dumbbells here, there's two.

There's an eastern one and a western one.

This is the western one.

They are actually going to get rid of that altogether

so there'll be two through roads which will then prevent

all of the congestion of all of the heavy goods vehicles trying

to get under this bridge and around both of the teardrops.

The cost of redesigning the junction is just over £190 million.

A private contractor will be overseeing and carrying out the works.

Could they put a pole on this side and string it across?

And then we can go down once we get into the highway boundary?

In charge of the project is construction manager Mark Sutton.

The junction needs improving.

If you've got vast amounts of traffic

there's an increased risk of accidents.

Unfortunately, the Catthorpe interchange is known

for its severe accidents that have occurred over the last decade.

The design to replace the old dumbbell system

will take two years to complete and involve building six new bridges,

four slip roads and a local link road

on 78 acres of newly acquired farmland.

I've just got a call from our general foreman out on-site

and he's released the bulls into the field.

He has scattered feed all around, very close to our works boundary.

I don't know how to deal with that.

I must have been sick the day we did this at uni

cos all I want to do is put a fence up.

'I started working for Skanska just over 10 years ago.

'I love the engineering and I love these big, massive

'infrastructure jobs and the challenge they pose.'

Everyone else can sit in an office

and maybe they get a report produced at the end of the day but we can go

out on the ground and you get to see the bridges, the roads, the highways.

They're there for the lifetime.

Whenever a civil engineer drives down and he's got company in the car,

they're always bragging about what they've built

and showing off the structures that they've done.

But for the local community around Catthorpe, the construction

of a safer and less congested junction is a mixed blessing.

Is that the slip road there, as well?

The slip road will come... start from the far end.

Michael and Susan Grindle have owned their farm next to the junction for the last 40 years.

All these trees are going to come down. They've got to come down.

So what's going to happen is we'll have more noise and more light.

I just think it's an awful shame

when they take this land for these roads which we will never get back.

We're supposed to be a green and pleasant land

and we are just getting built upon.

Is it necessary, really?

Every day Michael Grindle and his sons have to negotiate

motorway traffic to get to their fields.

Now they'll have to contend with months of roadworks

as the junction is redesigned.

It's a very strange junction.

You've got motorway traffic and local traffic intermingling,

which is never a good thing, really.

We're both sides of the junction, really,

and we've got a field right in the middle of the junction,

which we call the triangle field cos it's a triangle, for obvious reasons.

We've always had to use that junction. We've lived with it.

I mean, it's going to be a headache

because we won't be able to get to it that way. We don't know yet.

We are in talks with the Highways Agency and Skanska

about what they can provide for us so that we can get to that land.

It's going to make it, to be polite, a pain.

It's not just the local humans who could be affected by the roadworks.

-Otters.

-Otters.

-We're supposed to be fitting an otter ledge to the A14 bridge.

-That one.

Hedgehogs, there is no Skanska requirement

but it specifically says we need to produce a poster for hedgehogs.

-Can they read?

-Yes!

-Very clever hedgehogs in this area.

-"Keep out."

-"Don't come this way."

-Amphibians?

-Yeah, for the first one.

-Newts.

Leave that area clear until after the newts have been relocated.

OK, so, newts...

-OK, I'm happy with them.

-OK.

Out on the ground, environmental coordinator Richard Waddell

works with both the ecologists and the Skanska engineers.

We'll leave that maple in and just...

From the maple up.

The issue we've got here is Skanska want to get rid of this hedgerow

and all this vegetation here before the birds start to nest.

It's pretty warm at the moment

and normally the birds will start nesting from March,

but there's a risk they'll start nesting now

cos it is getting quite warm.

But the newts are likely to be hibernating in the hedgerows,

the base of the hedgerows here, so they can go into all the other

areas of the site with large machines to get rid of this vegetation.

But here they're going to have to come in with, er, chain saws,

pull it out by hand, make sure they don't trample on any newts.

And then once your guys get in there in the thick of it, if you make sure

that you're keeping the remaining stumps a minimum of 150 mil?

Six inches above the ground.

They're a protected species, they're a European protected species.

We've got a good population of newts in this country.

They're still on the decline, but because of that we have to

protect our population of great crested newts.

For now, the base of the hedgerows in this section will remain

until the newts awake from hibernation

and are then transferred to their breeding ponds.

I've never seen a newt.

I've never seen a great crested newt.

And I've definitely not picked one up.

You need to be licensed to pick one up.

The number of lorries seems to me to have grown so much.

Drives me crazy.

Just be careful of your position, you seem to be getting a little bit

-scared of these lorries or something, are you?

-A little bit.

There's enough room for you all.

Now this I don't like.

I feel sandwiched, and there's three, one after the other.

So you've got nowhere to go.

And this is why I don't like motorway driving.

The majority of people on the motorway will say, "If everybody

"drives sensibly and correctly, then we'll all get on fine."

Out on the road,

the Central Motorway Police Group target drivers falling foul of the

law as part of their mission to make the motorway safer.

Got a seat belt on? Good lad!

Today, Sergeant Rob Lever and PC Dave Gaunt are patrolling

a section of the M6 in an unmarked lorry.

Yeah, it's a red seat belt hung down by the side.

He refuses to look at me.

Height for us is a really big advantage because, obviously,

from a car perspective looking up to a lorry,

it's very difficult to be able to get a clear view.

This gives you the advantage that you can really look down

into the cars as well and catch some of those people out.

I've got a Transit van to my near side now that's on the phone.

Looks like he's got a white-ish sort of Samsung up to his right ear.

Switched the phone across to his other ear, and he's just put it down.

Busted.

THEY LAUGH

We've got, erm, a vehicle that we're following at the moment

which Dave has detected that the driver's not wearing his seat belt.

So one of our patrols who's just waiting on the hard shoulder here,

he's going to... pull this vehicle over

and deal with him for the seat belt offence.

No, he still hasn't got it on now.

My colleagues who are stopping the vehicles that we're seeing,

they're referring people for education courses.

And when these drivers go on the courses they will see what we see.

It really does work, it really does prevent people from, er,

continuing to drive using their phones or not

wearing their seat belt, so it's a valuable lesson,

er, and one best learned in a classroom and not for real.

Hello, put your seat belt on.

Put your seat belt on.

HE SIGHS

Just drop back a fraction.

Put your seat belt on.

SIREN WAILS

25 miles away at junction six,

Inspector Mark Watkins is heading to a road traffic collision.

It's unknown what you're going to be dealing with

within the next sort of half an hour or so.

Things change very, very quickly, almost like the weather.

What we know is that traffic on the northbound carriageway slowed down.

The lorry at the front, that's been hit by the blue lorry,

which has hit the taxi, and the other lorry at the back has then

gone into the back of the blue lorry.

Amazingly, the driver of the blue lorry, his cab has actually

come off as part of the collision, and has landed in the carriageway.

You can see, it's fairly obvious,

the white bit should be on the bit with the engine.

You would expect there to be really quite serious injuries

as a result of this, and amazingly, everybody has walked away from this.

But it's brought the M6 motorway to a complete and utter closure.

It's been carnage. It's the only way to describe it, it's carnage.

We've got traffic queuing in all directions

and we've got six lanes of queuing traffic on the A38M.

All the traffic that was travelling northbound on the M6

automatically gets diverted towards Birmingham city centre.

So we're pushing more traffic in

and there's more traffic trying to come out.

It just grinds to a halt eventually.

Lane three, please! Look that way!

Cos they've been stuck for so long,

they obviously want to know what's been causing it,

but what you're starting to see is they're going slowly,

starting to speed up, but trying to

look at what's happening behind them at the same time.

And worryingly they're starting to veer towards me a little bit.

Slow down! Slow down!

It doesn't sound very nice, does it, rubbernecking,

but, er, it's exactly what it is.

People are stretching their neck, looking over their shoulders,

trying to see what's going on.

See people driving their cars on the other side of the carriageway,

filming with their mobile phones as they're driving past.

"As long as I'm getting me quick upload to Twitter or Facebook,"

I mean, they're happy, and that's all they can think about.

Looking at somebody else's misery.

Taking pictures on your phone is still using your mobile phone, mate!

£100 fine and three points. Get on your way.

Hi, Neil.

Recovery teams take away the damaged lorries, but the carriageway

can't be reopened until the motorway has been inspected.

Lanes three and four might be quite badly damaged.

We might just have to close lanes three and four

and only open two lanes.

But it's still better than none, so, we'll see where it goes.

It's just a waiting game for us now.

Noel Philips is the incident duty officer.

He's concerned that the fluid from the crash

has leaked onto the carriageway.

Does smell of diesel, yeah, yeah.

I'm just going to have to carry on treating it,

see if we can get it up and get it absorbed up.

If not, it's going to have to be, er,

try and do something about resurfacing,

but that's the last option.

Diesel's really, really... it causes a big problem.

Erm, if it does get to that stage and it's seeped in too deep and

we can't get it off the carriageway, you have to resurface it.

The diesel and the oil, they've started going into the tarmac.

As soon as you get any rain on that, it's just going to come

straight back out again and we're going to end up with accidents.

'The signs aren't good at the moment.

'It's going to be a resurfacing job.'

So all closure for a while then?

-'Yes, it's going to be a long night.'

-Oh, dear.

The inspector's just inspected the carriageway and it's worse

than worse-case scenario cos we thought it'd only be two lanes.

Unfortunately, all four lanes need to be resurfaced.

We have to keep the carriageway shut

until I'm certain that the travelling public can travel on

the network in the same condition previous to the incident.

If I neglected to do my job, then the next incident that'll happen,

or accident that'll happen would be due to my neglect,

and that's not what we're here for.

DRILL RATTLES

It probably opened as a managed motorway two weeks ago.

-So it's still fairly new.

-And you're already digging...?

And we're already digging it up, yeah.

There's going to be a fair bit of work.

In the end, it took a team of road workers 6 hours and 40 minutes

to resurface the carriageway.

The bill for the work is estimated at over £40,000,

and will be paid for by the insurers of the vehicles involved.

Obviously this can't go on to the taxpayers.

This has to be sought after and a payment has to be taken from

the people that caused the incident, and it's not the taxpayers.

The cost of redesigning Catthorpe Junction at the start of

the M6 is just over £190 million of taxpayers' money.

It's just nice after all these years to suddenly be out here.

We've got pegs out, we've got the fence lines coming up,

we've got the trees coming down, the speed cameras going up.

We're going to get a good start on this job,

it's going to be fantastic.

After 11 years of planning,

the first stage of the roadworks has begun.

Like vampires, aren't we? Night walkers.

As the motorways can't be closed during the redesign work,

the first step is to give the construction workers safe areas

in which to operate.

Ohhhh, Jesus!

We will have narrower lanes than usual in place, so you need to

drop the speed down so people are driving safely through.

The barriers are there, designed to be impacted at a certain speed.

And we have that all designed to ensure that the people

that are going to be working here on the verges,

putting the new duct runs in,

putting the new bridges in, are kept safe.

It's going to cause havoc, like, taking three lanes down to two lanes

for the M1 and the M6, but, you know, it's got to be done.

That's the thing that the public can't seem to get their head around.

They want the roads repairing, they want 'em maintained,

but they don't want anybody to come out and do it.

So what are you supposed to do?

That's why everything's done at night, because it's,

you know, it's a lot quieter.

Damien West and his team will be marking out the new temporary lanes.

This is, er, a lining machine, plastic lining machine.

Does all the variant types, white, black, spray, extrusion, rib line.

Can you pull forward so we can set up?

To paint the new white lines over miles of motorway, a high-powered

dryer prepares the road before paint is sprayed onto the carriageway.

DRYER BUZZES

They're pretty ferocious, like, they're about 135 decibel.

TRUCK BLARES

Until Catthorpe Junction is finished,

there will be night works on and off for the next 24 months.

Do you know why this junction is being redesigned and stuff?

Yeah.

-Tell me why.

-Cos it's shit.

Yeah, it's been needing doing for a long time.

Just a mile from the roadworks is the rural village of Swinford.

Today construction manager Mark Sutton and his team

are holding a public exhibition here to unveil their new plans

for Catthorpe Junction.

I've got great faith that, er,

everyone's going to be nice and polite

and that we're going to have all the answers ready for people.

Last minute revision.

We're all stressed!

HE LAUGHS

Had to give my skipper a quick call.

Ivan Marriott works for the Highways Agency, and will be helping

construction manager Mark answer queries from the locals.

So that junction's going to change completely?

What we're building there is the mirror image of

the existing off-slip.

See, I lived at Catthorpe till I got married.

-So, I've seen a lot of changes, and that were 42 years ago.

-43.

43, all right.

Every time we come through there's bumpers and wheel trims...

Hello, somebody's smacked something!

It should never have been done as it was

but obviously people didn't foresee the amount of traffic.

This is good, this is all for the best.

What I've taught myself is not to open the mouth

unless you know what you're going to respond with.

There's no room for blagging anything,

you've got to be completely truthful, completely honest.

If you don't know, if I don't know, say so, make the note,

get the details and come back with the details later.

-Who can I contact during the night?

-During the night?

-Yes.

-You can contact... Do you want my details?

-Who do you work for?

-I'm Skanska...

-No, I certainly don't. Not under any conditions.

With night works already under way,

the construction has become all too real for local farmer Mr Turney.

I haven't had any sleep for three nights.

I've got seven or eight vehicles grinding, flashing lights

and banging all night in front of the house.

-I object to being woken up!

-Yeah, I appreciate that.

How are you supposed to work when you can't get a night's sleep?

We have to...

-Some elements of the work we have to do at night-time because we can't do them during the day.

-Why not?

We've got to do the work at night-time

because that's the only time we can get on the network and do

this particular activity, which is very dangerous, and therefore...

Well, how dangerous do you think it is if we drive tractors

and deal with stock and we've had no sleep?

-I appreciate...

-That's safe, is it?

You shouldn't be allowed to wake people at night. People are entitled to a night's sleep.

I don't want to disturb your sleep, Mr Turney, that's not what we're trying to do here.

We'll look to see if there's anything else we can do

-and I'll come back to you on that one.

-Very good.

-OK?

-Mm.

-Thank you very much.

-Thank you.

It is like being a little bit on Question Time.

You don't know what people are going to throw at you.

But I do understand that in circumstances

where somebody's being kept awake at night or whatever

they're going to be agitated, for reasons, and I know I've got to deal

with that as part of the role we do here, so...

-It's not over yet.

-Yeah!

One regular user of Catthorpe Junction is trucker Paul Reid.

He will also be attending the exhibition.

It's notorious. I mean, I don't think there's anybody in the country

that doesn't know about the junction.

I don't believe that what's being put forward is sufficient enough

to improve the whole junction itself.

He's dedicated hours of his spare time

designing his own vision of the junction.

I was watching the film The Great Escape, many years ago,

and I thought that's where the idea came from, the idea was, well, if we

can build tunnels as good as what we can, why can't we do the same here?

I always believed that the British are best for engineering anything.

It consists of two underpasses, it has additional levelling roads,

which come from the M1 northbound, from the M6, and it also

has from the A14 going up

to M1 southbound in the far corner.

Now it's time to see how Paul's plans measure up against Mark's.

HE MUTTERS

-Hello there.

-Hello.

-Mr Reid.

-Got a couple of questions.

-Yeah, just a quick look on here.

There's a hell of a lot of lorries that use this junction.

This is the bugbear, because lorries aren't fast, they're slow.

They need plenty of room to merge together.

When you've got cars dittering around in here, out there, it's like

a pinball game, and unfortunately that's why accidents happen.

With the construction of the contraflow

and the sort of taper that we'll form, that will

actually physically prevent people from doing that.

I've looked at this and I've looked obviously at mine

and as far as I'm concerned the concept is exactly the same,

it's just that mine's tunnels and yours is a dual carriageway which

goes under the M1, but as it stands, looking at this, yes, it will work.

I hope so. That's the main thing, is get rid of that congestion on that M6.

You know, that's the main driver.

The M6 is a major transport route,

with lorries carrying up to 182 million tonnes

of goods to the north-west of the country every year.

This will do for me. Golf November Zulu.

The train that looks like it's worth doing.

Keeping watch over them at a strategic check site near

Junction 14 is a team of inspectors from the Department for Transport.

Keep moving.

This tyre's about to blow at any time, it'll go bang.

385/65-22.5 super singles, these are known as.

This goes bang, chances are it could rip off the back tyre

and all sorts of things.

He won't be leaving here with this tyre on, that's for sure.

He'll get a fixed penalty for it.

Change. Change.

The inspectors here target lorries they suspect are faulty or unsafe

and have the power to pull over any lorry driving on British roads.

One of the supporting straps is broken.

And the trouble is that the other strap and the supporting structure

is that weak, that's just not going to last much longer.

If it fell out, it's bouncing down the road, and that's going to

cause a massive obstruction, and possibly cause fatalities.

It's more than likely the trailer will be immobilised

if it's not repaired by five o'clock.

We get treated like scum by everybody,

by other car drivers, by the police,

but yet every single thing that's in every shop and everybody's house

has been in the back of a lorry at some point in time.

And there'd be no next-day delivery or no fresh bread

if it wasn't for us, so, you know, they should be grateful that we...

..pound the highways night and day.

But lorry drivers have limitations on the amount of hours

they can pound the highways.

Can I just ask you to jump out so I can check your tacho?

Tachographs record their every movement and will reveal whether

a driver has gone over their maximum nine hours maximum

regulated driving time.

Clearly we see offences at this side of the road every single day.

Whether that's a deliberate attempt to flout the rules

and regulations or whether it's a genuine lack of knowledge,

it's debatable, isn't it, really?

But a minority of lorry drivers flout the rules more deliberately.

The use of simple magnets can disable the tachograph,

allowing them to drive longer undetected.

We've got the magnet that was actually found here

and it's a particularly strong magnet

and we've got some photos of the evidence here as well,

so that is currently going through due process at the moment.

The information we received from the roadside was that in fact

there were 307 kilometres missing from the tachograph

down to that magnet being utilised and in fact the driver had

been on duty for over 19 hours when he was stopped.

As well as disabling the tachograph,

they also interfere with the anti-lock braking systems and the

speed limiters on the vehicles, so you've got a nasty cocktail there.

This is a company from Netherlands.

We see there that we're entering in the south-east ports,

they're travelling north-west through the Midlands up on the M6.

From April 5 they become a national target for impounding.

So what we can expect over the next couple of weeks,

if we're successful in targeting,

-is one or two of these vehicles being impounded.

-That's right.

-Good.

In the last year,

38 magnets have been found at this check site on the M6.

-So...this is the cupboard of shame basically!

-Yes.

-Everything up here is magnets.

-Absolutely full.

What happens is the magnet kills the electronic signal

and then the tachograph just thinks it's at rest.

The companies quote for the work and they give them

these unrealistic timescales to get there

and the drivers are under pressure to do it and the boss says,

"Well, I don't care how you do it,

"if you've got to be there at 8am, you've got to be there.

"If you've got to drive through the night,

"I don't care how you do it," and that's what they do.

-They're risking their own lives too.

-And other road users.

They're driving a 40-tonne missile, you know.

And, you know, they can be extremely...

You know, cause carnage and death, and this is what the problem is.

Look at this big lorry, Sebby!

What you think's inside that big lorry, Sebby?

What do you think it's carrying inside?

Think there's monsters in there?

-Yeah.

-Monsters?

-Yes? Monsters?

Monsters on the motorway?

I missed it.

So this is still a motorway?

This is a motorway at the moment, yes.

You can have some of this if you want, have a drink.

You need to tell me if you need to stop for a wee-wee again, Sebby.

I know, but that's James's milk, but you can have some if you want.

Where's Sebby's?

Don't know.

Oh, he's just thrown it on the floor.

Sebastian... I can't reach that now.

Every year, millions of lorries travel up and down the M62,

carrying everything from petrol to sewage,

from beer to live animals.

How long do we think?

I've said it could take up to three hours to repair the barriers.

Outside Stoke-on-Trent on the M6, a lorry carrying a cargo of bread,

vegetables and milk has overturned and spilled its load.

Quickly found it on camera and realised there was quite a lot

of fluid coming out of it, which was later discovered to be milk.

Although it's only milk, it can be quite a serious issue.

What caused the accident is unclear.

But luckily the driver escaped with minor injuries.

Now the Highways Agency must close the whole southbound carriageway

as they attempt to clear the scene.

We've stopped the traffic,

ready to install a nice big line of cones across there.

Yeah, they're travelling through now to meet us.

I'm just making sure that everyone's aware what I'm doing.

Motorway maintenance manager Paul Diamond

needs to get to the scene as quickly as possible.

Cheers, thank you.

Just been given the OK now to travel northbound

on the southbound carriageway,

which is under a total closure, so it's safe to do so.

Which will assist us in getting to scene.

Paul's job is to oversee the vital repairs

and assess the cost of the damage.

That's a rare sight.

It's a car travelling the wrong way down the motorway.

That's one way of missing the queues.

He obviously knew a road worker.

A lot of the milk you probably can just see has come off the truck.

It's gone into the drains.

And going under here, down the water course,

the Environmental Agency have been and they're worried,

they have a team down there at the moment

trying to stop it getting into a pond and contaminating the pond.

Because milk is worse than most stuff,

because it just takes all the oxygen out of the water and kills fish.

There's a big issue when it gets into the water,

a very costly issue as well.

So will a fish have a cost?

Yeah, carp can be worth up to £1,000 a fish,

for a big fish.

So it all depends now on how much of the milk

has got into the watercourse.

Has the diesel or the milk got through to the pond on the route?

-It has?

-It has, yeah.

People don't realise that something happening here

can affect something a kilometre away from the motorway.

And it's the environment and of course, the environment,

no-one wants to damage the environment in any shape or form.

But the motorway must run!

They're in the position I'd expect them to be in now

to start lifting the vehicle.

So hopefully it shouldn't take too long.

Last one I did down here was loaded with salmon,

it had done the same thing.

And all we were doing was carting salmon for hours.

Four or five hours into the job,

from hauling salmon about, you smell a little bit, you know.

Oh, the cab slipped.

-We're going to get something under the wheels to make it grip.

-Yeah.

Recovery are having a bit of trouble at the moment

getting this vehicle up, it's slipping on the milk and diesel.

At the moment, we're in the hands of a recovery firm.

So as soon as they're out of the way,

we'll start repairing the centre reserve.

The lads can work here, so we're getting this one done now.

As long as the recovery's here, we are sort of depressurised slightly.

But as soon as they're gone,

that's when the pressure is piled on to us to get out the way.

It's a very long junction, 14 to 15.

Our priority is informing the public.

If you don't have to go on this motorway, don't.

But you can see how many people are involved on the scene at the moment.

It's a huge recovery operation.

Watch now, watch now. Here we go, here we go.

See what's happened, as it's been lifted up?

The side has completely come off it, we just made our job even worse.

This has added hours to the recovery.

The HGV has been righted by the looks of it.

They righted that, the side's split,

and the rest of the contents have fallen out into the carriageway.

-Oh, God!

-So there's more bread and milk on the carriageway now!

This is Keele services.

And it's absolutely gridlocked,

and we have 60 minutes of delays on the southbound.

We have 11km of congestion.

All filtering into a single lane of traffic.

It is a huge problem.

And the traffic will only get busier.

Now, these guys, they've had all of the local travel alerts.

Every junction, we've warned them about these delays.

I'll show you the end of the queue.

Oh! You may need a tank

to get through the traffic for the next two hours.

Along its 232 miles, the M6 carves through

some of Britain's most beautiful rural landscapes.

In the redesign to make Catthorpe Junction at the start of the M6

less congested and safer, 78 acres of farmland have been acquired.

Every project has some ecological species

that's causing problems for a contractor.

With this one, it's the great crested newt.

To protect the colony of newts

in this section of the proposed roadworks,

one-and-a-half miles of special fencing

is being erected across farmland.

The biggest issue is this is a protected species,

and all here are liable for prosecution

if great crested newts are found to be killed by these works.

Along the fence,

buckets are dug into the ground to catch the endangered newts.

The newts go to the newt fencing,

they'll hit the fence and then the aim is that

they'll walk along the fence and fall in the bucket.

And it's project ecologist Nick Steggall's job

to check them every day.

We've got some vegetation in here,

so that they can actually hide under from any predators

that might be about at night.

We've got what we call a mammal ladder,

which is effectively a stick

which we've placed in the trap

so that if any small mammals fall in there,

they can actually climb out and free themselves.

We also have a float,

so that if we get a heavy deluge through the night,

so they don't drown, then we'll release them the next morning.

You never know what you're going to find, hopefully great crested newts.

We're going to trap for 60 days in this area.

But come the end of that trapping period,

we need five clear days without newts.

Or without a newt find.

So if we find a newt on day 59,

Skanska will have to trap until day 64.

And if we find another newt on day 63, it will go on and on and on.

There was a project further north,

they took account of the cost of the fencing, exclusion,

some of the mitigation measures for newts,

and they estimated it was about £37,000 per newt on that job.

Yeah, most of this truck is now strapped up.

We're just putting the last of the load on,

just giving them a hand to try and speed things up.

On the M6, the lorry carrying the cargo of milk,

bread and vegetables has now been righted.

Leeks, carrots, parsnips.

-Turnips.

-I've seen it all now.

I'm sure that somebody will complain

that there's no milk and vegetables at the store.

But the clear up has meant that the southbound carriageway

has been closed for four hours, causing even bigger delays.

I've already noted down a lot of vehicles that have actually

already pulled over onto the hard shoulder. You get cars overheating.

You get HGVs pulling over for breaks,

because they know that they've been stuck for so long.

This is the start of our region.

All we can do is keep pushing

to get this vehicle cleared as quickly as possible.

Every little helps!

Hi, Dave, you all right?

Motorway maintenance manager Paul Diamond is responsible for clearing the scene

and fixing the damaged barriers as soon as possible.

Hello, we're going to need two to man that gate,

and then three on the barrier.

Oops...

Starts off with the public.

They get stuck in traffic,

they ring the Highways Agency information lines, start complaining.

That then gets relayed to the Highways Agency control room,

they relay it to our control room, and our control room relay it to us.

And now it's ETAs, ETAs, ETAs all the time.

What time you going to be done?

Looking at what we've got, if we get the blokes in quick enough,

I think we should have it blocked off by nine o'clock.

That's if they go in the next half an hour,

three quarters of an hour with this trailer.

The only bad news is, the liquid that was on the trailer, the milk, etc,

has got into the drains and it's got into the golf course

and now it's got through into their lake.

And they're trying to do as much as they can

to lessen the damage that's caused.

She hasn't come back yet

so I don't know if it's killing fish or anything as yet.

Looking at it now, we're getting somewhere now.

So, as soon as recovery's out the way, we'll start the clean-up

and then we'll repair everything.

Are you ready to go?

You're just trusting that your team manager on scene

is having the right amount of contact

and putting the right amount of pressure on them.

-Where we at?

-Er... Further than what we were last time.

Give a rough estimate of time?

-Another hour.

-Another hour?

-Yeah.

-OK.

-What's the right amount of pressure?

-A lot.

HE LAUGHS

ETAs are getting later. It's approximately one hour.

It's my job to make sure that these guys feel the pressure.

-To make sure that everything moves as quickly as it can.

-It's all go.

Busy, busy, busy.

I mean, I've done hazardous spillages before.

They're the worst, actually.

There was one with a conditioner, Lenor, that spilled across it all.

And sweeping it actually activated it,

so it made it worse before it got better.

It smelt nice. Soft.

HE CHUCKLES

This is an incident that will go to the ministers,

they'll want to know why it's taken so long

to get the carriageway reopened.

Because obviously it has a massive impact,

not just on the travelling public,

but also on the finances of the nation.

We'll all just carry on getting wet. Cos we love it!

-Can't see nothing.

-Visibility's really low.

Further down the M6, traffic officers Keith and JJ are on patrol.

You could be the best driver in the world

and you're adhering to the road.

Some other fool ain't going to take any notice and wipe you out.

A van has broken down on the hard shoulder.

But as it's rush hour, the Smart Motorway Scheme is operating.

And the lane is open to traffic.

Our cruiser's arrived on the scene,

recovery is on scene at the same time as we've got there

so hopefully one or the other will move the vehicle out

so we can get the traffic flowing again.

He's only been there seven or eight minutes.

We've put some cones out and some signs out just to make

sure it's a safer working environment for him, basically.

Are those cones really going to make a difference? Those little cones?

Uh...

I'm hoping it does.

It really puts the heebie jeebies on me, to be fair,

because we are so reliant on drivers paying attention.

If we have a lapse in concentration, they could kill us.

You don't know, do you?

I'll get the cones in now.

See, there you go. That car.

Taking no notice. Absolutely ridiculous.

Can't really legislate or...

..put procedures in place for idiots. I'm sorry, but you can't.

Why are we running?

There may be another idiot using this lane.

That's why I want to get out of here...

..and go to the next stop alive.

Should call it the Mad 6 instead of the M6.

In the last five years, eight road workers have been killed

and 135 injured while working on England's motorways.

It's crazy.

And many more have had near misses.

I want to show you guys. Lane one closure for a tyre change on an HGV.

I was getting my hat out of the back of the car because it was raining.

I heard people shout, "Watch out!" I've looked up

and this HGV is coming straight towards the car.

It was as if everything was happening in slow motion.

And I thought I had more time to move out of the way than I actually did.

Look at that.

One, two.

Dude!

-Oh!

-That's close.

-HGV going at that speed.

Do you know what I mean? To this day I won't tell my wife about it.

I haven't told her about it because I don't know what she'd do.

-Probably say I had to quit and get another job.

-40 tonne weapon.

I put my uniform on, go into work. And I might not be coming back.

'We've already talked about it, me and my partner

'and I've prepared everything for the potential of me not coming back.

'Everything's in one place.'

Life insurance, funeral stuff.

All the pensions.

Work stuff. All the documents.

At least if she ever needs it or if anything happens to me

she knows what to do.

I want to be cremated, so don't want to be a burden on anybody.

And be scattered on the M6.

HE LAUGHS

40 miles back up the M6,

the motorway maintenance team have finally cleared the overturned

grocery lorry and repaired the damaged barriers.

We're reopening the carriageway now. Hurray! Then a cup of tea.

As soon as they see that first cone going up, everybody will stop.

And they'll wait for the next cone

and if there's a gap you'll see them.

And they're gone. Every time.

Chuck them to the middle.

So, I'd say by the time the fourth cone comes up, they'll be off.

You ready?

There's your first cone.

See who goes up first. Someone will make that move.

There you go. They're off.

As soon as the fourth cone was off, they're off.

That's it. It's open now and they're away.

That's dangerous. They don't have

any concern for any of these guys in the road.

They just put down cones. And they hate cones.

HGVs coming that close to you, it's not a safe place.

We've got to watch out for each other. It's dark, it's wet,

it's fast.

The slightest wrong turn for somebody in a vehicle, could swerve.

If you're not watching, your mate's watching.

He's going to shout and you're going to jump one way or the other.

Possibly save your life.

Very nice sight seeing the cones come off.

There you go. All clear.

They'll be relieved to get through and on their way.

It's cost businesses and industry a fortune.

It was a big job. Massive for spilt milk.

You don't cry over it

but it's been a very long closure for us.

At Catthorpe Junction at the start of the M6

groundworks on the redesign to make the interchange safer

and less congested are under way.

But on a section improving one of the local roads, the newts

and other wildlife are still causing concern.

Trying to pollard these trees to allow the works to go ahead.

But the issue we've got now is some of the trees have birds

nesting in them and some haven't.

And some of the trees that haven't got birds nesting in them

have got birds in the tree next to it.

So the ecologists are a little bit twitchy.

A blackbird had nested down the road there.

And that caused a bit of a constraint.

But some magpies came past and ate the eggs

and the blackbird is now gone.

And so that constraint has been removed

so it changes on a day-to-day basis.

There's a nest in there somewhere.

-OK, has that one been identified previously?

-No.

So now we've got blue tits nesting in this tree that we didn't know about

until Nick just told us.

Things change pretty quickly.

Have a little move of the grass.

Turn over the float, make sure there's nothing in there.

But there's one creature everyone's desperate to see.

Every day project ecologist Nick checks

the traps for newts that have woken from hibernation.

Found a great crested newt. Found a little female.

If I turn her over ever

so slightly she's got a bright orange underside there.

And she's got spots underneath. Each one of them is like a fingerprint.

-It's unique to that individual.

-A lot bigger than what I expected.

Quite beautiful, as well. Aren't they?

-Like mini dinosaurs.

-Yeah. A little crocodile.

She was on our site so she has been commuting over to the pond

over there to breed and lay her eggs.

Expensive newt.

-That makes five. The cost is coming down.

-Absolutely.

Once caught, the newts are relocated away from the roadworks to the

safety of the nearby farmland.

There she goes on her way.

Let's see how close she is to the breeding pond

so hopefully make it there tonight.

The trapping will go on until there's no signs of newts.

And they've all been removed from the site of the proposed roadworks.

Great crested newts, particularly the males, they're like street boy,

wide boy.

Marching across the landscape.

We spend tens of thousands of pounds a year to protect the newts.

Strange really.

When I grew up, we used to go collecting newts as kids.

Used to come back with buckets of them all the time.

And all of a sudden they're all protected.

It's been quite a journey to get to where we are today

but it's not just, we want to build a road, we go out and build a road.

There's a huge amount of time, effort and work

and passion to improve the safety of the network.

The job's not easy but then whose job ever is easy?

Ask anyone if their job's easy.

I don't think I'd enjoy it if it was easy. It would be dull.

And at the end of this job,

when you do drive along and you drive along the completed road

and you see the structures that you've built,

the road that you've built and you see the difference it makes,

you do take a huge sense of pride out of it.

I guess it's just a strip of tarmac that we all share.

That's one common goal we all have.

That we're travelling in the same direction on the same

piece of tarmac.

-It's about choreographing... You do dance, don't you?

-I do.

-You know all about choreography.

-I know loads.

-Like dancing in traffic.

Oh, no.

You've only got to take your eyes off the road for one split

second and the traffic's at a standstill and you're going

straight into the back of somebody else and it's easy done.

Let's all move along as a hippy commune

and get to where we need to get to.

We're all in a hurry.

Everybody wants to get to where they want to be.

But we all want to get there in one piece.

I haven't been on this road for at least 10 years.

Junction 17. This is the stretch of road...

..where my husband lost his life.

He'd just got onto the motorway. He was in the centre lane doing 60mph.

And a long distance lorry driver crashed into the back

of a mobile crane.

On the northbound carriageway. On the inside lane.

Which sent that...

..crane across three lanes of traffic.

It hit the centre reservation, flew up into the air.

Went over the outside lane

and crashed straight onto the roof of my husband's car.

And then carried on.

And crashed into another lorry on the inside lane of the

southbound carriageway.

Three people died in the crash.

And the lorry driver was sentenced to five years

in prison for causing death whilst driving.

It was said in court the driver had been on the road for 21 hours

out of 29.

I hate the word accident.

I've never hated a word so much.

My boys were...

..just three and four months old.

And my daughter was 14 months.

And they don't know him.

And they won't ever know him.

I'd like people to understand that being responsible isn't

a trivial thing.

Obeying the rules of the road,

doing what you're supposed to do is...

..necessary.

That's all I want is just...

..everybody to just take a minute to think...

..about what you're doing.