Pain of the wartime doctor
Plus: Mission Pothole and the upcoming village hotspot
Hello and welcome to today’s edition of The Lancashire Lead. The August bank holiday is always a strange time in newsrooms - or more commonly home offices nowadays.
Much of the focus gets taken up by the quirky and unusual events which pop up at this time of year - and with soapbox racing and gravy wrestling there’s no shortage in Lancashire.
Even so, there’s been plenty happening in the past few days to get our teeth stuck into and we start with Yasmin Al-Najar’s chat with the doctor and father who has just returned from a month long stint helping civilians in war torn Gaza.
Anaesthetist Matt Newport, from Ramsbottom, has now visited the country three times to carry out life-saving work for charity UK-Med and has seen things no person should ever have to see.
“It’s the huge number of wounded children and women that has left a real impact on me - right down to babies just a day or two old and weighing just a couple of kilograms. An air strike in Khan Younis on July 7 brought 30 trauma patients to our emergency department over the course of two hours.
“When the dust settled, we had seven bodies in our mortuary, including a very young boy who had been shot through the heart and was dead on arrival. The child’s father was brought in with him, near-death, after a bullet to the head.
“Shamefully, I avoided eye contact with the mother of the family, not knowing if I could hold it together while thinking of my own wife and two-year-old daughter back in the UK.”
Dr Matt Newport
You can read the full article on LancsLive.
Closer to home, Blackpool and The Fylde College principal Alun Francis has offered some new analysis on the some of the problems which affect places like Blackpool and may have contributed to some of the disgraceful disorder we’ve seen in recent weeks.
Alun, who also chairs the Social Mobility Commission, makes an often overlooked point that many of the solution which are offered are oversimplified and fail to factor in the range of factors which contribute to ill-feeling among people feeling left behind.
Writing in the Financial Times, he cites factors including lack of jobs and investment, wasteful and ineffective outsourcing of vital services to the private sector, and challenges of social mobility.
You can read the full article here.
We all know the frustration of waiting for potholes and bad road surfaces to be replaced. But what if you lived somewhere where the road disappears completely underwater twice a day?
That’s the challenge which faced Lancashire County Council in its efforts to carry out much needed resurfacing work on a tidal road to Sunderland Point, at the tip of the peninsula between the River Lune and Morecambe Bay.
The road links to just 25 homes in a tiny hamlet but the breathtaking scenery and Sambo's Grave point of interest makes the remote location hugely popular with visitors.
Not only is the road completely underwater twice a day, the way that the tide flows means the ideal conditions for resurfacing only occurs one week in each month as well as relying on warm, dry conditions.
Those conditions have indeed occurred and now Lancashire County Council and contractor Miles MacAdam are patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
Toby Fitzsimmons, business development manager at Miles Macadam said:
"We were delighted to partner with Lancashire County Council to create a tailored, site-specific solution to the Sunderland Point Causeway.
"Our specialist grouted macadams are a durable, hard-wearing material reinforced with a secondary sealing process, thus considerably less susceptible to the damage caused by tidal flooding. Once again, it’s been a pleasure working collaboratively with Lancashire County Council to enhance their highways network."
In Sunday’s edition of the newsletter, I mentioned a visit to Haskayne - it’s a location whose name is usually published no more than once a year but it has also caught the attention of Mail Online.
The rural West Lancashire spot - or more accurately the wider Downholland area - was named in its list of the most up-and-coming hotspots to buy property.
The article is paywalled as part of the Mail+ subscription but has been picked up by titles including the Lancashire Telegraph and the Lancashire Post.
Among the attractions cited by the Mail are the ability to commute to Liverpool, Preston and Bolton and the enjoyment of living in “village life in the rawest sense”.
🇵🇸 Preston City Council has made progress on plans for a 'friendship' with a town in Palestine (LancsLive).
💷 A children’s home worker has won a £185k payout after being wrongly dismissed and discriminated against by Lancashire County Council (Lancashire Telegraph).
🦔 Firefighters were deployed in Preston for an unusual job - to rescue a trapped hedgehog (Blog Preston).
🎨 An artist is aiming to launch a monthly 'Repair Cafe' in Lancaster and Morecambe hoping to share skills and reduce waste (Beyond Radio).
🚗 Parking has been banned on Kirkham’s Market Square as part of plans to use the space for more public events (Blog Preston).
🚋 More than 80,000 trips have been made on Blackpool’s £23m new tramway extension in the first two month (Central Radio).
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