ON Thursday the notorious Grane Road between Haslingden and Blackburn claimed the lives of two teenage students in a horrific car crash. Blackburn College students Gareth Edwards, 19, and 17-year-old Joseph Slupski, both from Harwood, Bolton, died in the burned and crushed wreck, sending new shockwaves through every motorist who has ever travelled along the road. Here reporter SHELLEY WRIGHT, who lives on the Grane Road and often travels along it twice a day, gives a personal account of East Lancashire's "death road"...

LAST Thursday two young students followed me over the Grane Road to Blackburn in thick fog, mist and driving rain.

They cannot have been more than an hour behind me but as I settled at my desk with a brew, ready to start the day's work, they perished in a car engulfed in flames.

According to one eye witness, the 19-year-old driver simply lost control on a bend as a wagon came the other way.

The two teenagers didn't stand a chance and the image of that burnt, crushed, mangled wreckage that was once a car has haunted me ever since.

I hope it shocked and horrified every other driver who uses the road too, because it could so easily be any one of us.

It terrifies me to think that one minute I could be at home, wondering which top to wear, and an hour later involved in a crash so horrific I have to be identified by dental records.

And that must now be a very real fear for anyone using that road.

But if my experience living in and driving over Grane daily is anything to go by, the carnage will continue until every driver on Grane Road starts to respect it and every other driver on it. Because until then we can only expect more horrific scenes and more bunches of flowers left poignantly by the roadside.

Only last night I was involved in a road rage incident with a bloke in a Ford Escort who, I imagine, was using Grane Road as a rat-run from the A59 Haslingden bypass to the M65, as so many motorists in the North West now do.

He drove his car bumper-to-bumper to mine from the moment he pulled out of the slip-road and proceeded to wave, shout and hurl abuse at me as I made my way home.

He eventually overtook me as I indicated to pull in outside my house, accelerating though a residential area like he was already on the M65.

The incident is typical of what has happened in the 12 months since I moved in.

Every morning I struggle through the sheer volume of traffic.

Some vehicles have crashed directly outside my house, and I have lost count of the number of police cars and ambulances that race past in response to emergency calls further along the road.

The route is regularly shut because of these crashes and almost 90 people have been killed or injured in the past two years alone.

My neighbours and I, some of whom have lived there all their lives, are horrified by the huge increase in traffic that has occurred since the M65 extension opened in December 1997.

It thunders past our houses throughout the day and continues into the night as heavy goods vehicles thunder past so fast that car alarms go off, windows vibrate and the houses literally rock. But these vehicles become a bigger problem further up the road when they lose speed and slow down as they climb the twisting country road.

Frustrated drivers stuck behind these vehicles doing 20mph or less take ridiculous chances in an attempt to get past - though anyone who knows the road knows there are only a handful of places where it is safe to overtake.

Those same people, who regularly use and respect the road, who refuse to hurtle along at speed or overtake where it is not safe, are often faced with oncoming drivers overtaking and hurtling towards them - endangering everybody's lives.

A neighbour claims he was forced to pull off the road into a ditch or hit someone speeding the other way while others have been forced to hold their nerve and drive three-abreast as people overtake them on the narrow road.

I have often found myself dicing with death too as I cover my eyes at some of the sights.

Drivers regularly weave in and out of traffic in particularly notorious spots, overtake on blind bends and cross the line in the middle of the road in a bid to carve seconds off their journey.

But all they often do is cut their own life short - and it could be yours or mine.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.