Motorcyclist crashes on icy road

Joanne Taylor, 41, said she was taking a corner near the Baslow junction at 15 miles an hour when she hit sheet ice and skidded off the road.

She suffered a bruised pelvis and tailbone in the smash on Saturday morning at around 7.40am - just moments after a woman crashed into a river on the same corner and had to be airlifted to hospital.

“It is only a matter of time before someone is killed,” said Joanne, of Pennine Way, Loundsley Green. “I was going slow. I should have been able to walk away without injuries. I would have if the road was gritted.

“If the roads aren’t gritted, then people are going to be injured and people are going to die.”

Police said the car driver was taken to Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital, with non-life threatening injuries.

The crashes were amongst a spate of accidents throughout the county in the ice over the weekend. In Dukes Drive, Ashford-in-the-Water, at 11.49am on Sunday two cyclists travelling as part of a group skidded on ice.

One of the cyclists sustained head injuries and was flown via air ambulance to hospital in Stoke–on–Trent. He is now recovering from his injuries.

A Derbyshire County Council spokesman said: “We carry out gritting based on weather forecasts we receive from the Met Office and will grit if the temperature is due to drop below zero. On Friday we did not receive any forecasts of frosts or the temperature falling below zero and so we did not send out the gritters on Saturday morning.”