Havoc

Friday 23 December 2022
On the evening of Sunday 18 December, there were more than 250 accidents on primary routes in the south-west of the Netherlands in a short period of time. Between nine and eleven p.m. there were more accidents per hour than would normally be registered in an entire working day. At midnight, it appeared that IM recovery operators had dealt with 305 accidents throughout the day. That was the second highest figure ever. The only day on which greater havoc resulted was 7 January 2017. On that day, there were 366 collisions on IM roads.

Accident on the A58 at Bergen op Zoom on the evening of Sunday 18 December (IM-233716), dealt with by Van Egeraat Berging. This was one of the first accidents as a result of slippery conditions outside Zeeland.

Until the evening, it seemed more or less like it was a normal Sunday. The number of incident reports was higher than usual, but not out of the ordinary. That changed at 6:45 p.m. when an area of rain approached the country from the south-west. The roads were still cold after a week of freezing temperatures and became ice rinks. The first reports came from Zeeland, between 6:45 and 7:00 p.m. In the hour that followed, the problems were concentrated in the west of Noord-Brabant. An hour later, the slippery conditions had spread to Zuid-Holland, Utrecht and the rest of Noord-Brabant. There were also more collisions than usual in Limburg and the south of Noord-Holland and yet in the north and east of the country it seemed like there was very little going on.

Elise van der Graaf of Roos-Autoberging.nl takes questions from the press about the exceptional spike in callouts the previous evening. 'It was really chaotic overnight. We literally had 10 incident reports every 5 minutes'.

The ice was concentrated in various pockets; as a result the distribution of activity throughout the country was very patchy. Of the almost 500 incidents reported on IM roads after 6:45 p.m., Van Eijck Mobility responded to 122 of them, almost all in Noord-Brabant. In 45 of those cases there had been a collision. When snow fell on 7 February 2021 Van Eijck was also the company that had the greatest number of skid-related incidents to deal with. And recovery operators in the Rotterdam area, Takel-, Berging- en Transportbedrijf A. Barendregt in particular, had record-breaking workloads. This company's staff were called out 47 times in a period of just two hours, 28 of those callouts requiring them to clear debris after an accident. And then there was Roos-Autoberging.nl. Under normal circumstances this would not be considered a big company, but on 18 December it was one of the busiest IM recovery operators in the country. Roos responded to 18 incident reports, 11 of which related to an accident.

Days with the most IM reports since 2010

18 December was not just a day of many accidents. IM recovery operators were also called out to a high number of breakdown recoveries. In total, Stichting IMN's response centre ('LCM') processed 839 incident reports. This was the highest figure for a winter's day ever recorded. Recovery operators had only ever been busier on three very hot summer's days in 2019 and 2020. On the days in question, the 'hot weather protocol' was in force which means that all breakdowns must be removed from the motorway on the instructions of the road manager.