Scrapyard crushes van after driver stops to drop off old cooker

A driver looked on in horror as his van was crushed by mistake at a Coventry scrapyard. Ben Forrer had only left his Citroen Relay for a few minutes as he dropped off an old cooker at the Sita yard, in Longford. But workers mistook the van for scrap and began crushing it in the jaws of a mechanical grabber. By the time Ben saw what was happening the van was already a write-off, and power tools in the back he was using to build his own home were damaged.



The 33-year-old fireman, who lives 16 miles away in Swinford, near Rugby, was left stranded without a vehicle and had to get a friend to pick him up and take him home. Ben is angry nobody bothered to check to see who owned the van, or that no-one was inside. He said: “It’s an absolute wreck. The roof’s caved in and some of the panels are smashed, but it could have been a whole lot worse.

“What if I had a kid or a dog in the vehicle? They didn’t check to see if anybody was inside.” The drama unfolded at the scrapyard in Bedworth Road on Saturday morning. Ben was disposing of an oven for a friend but returned to find his van had disappeared. He said: “I walked down to the end of the yard and saw the front end of my van hanging off the end of a grabber. “I shouted ‘no, no, stop’. They were looking at me like I was mad. They were like ‘Oh my God, it’s never happened before’.



“They have admitted it was a mistake. They said they thought it was a bit odd that the tax was in date, and the tyres were OK. I can’t believe what’s happened. It was parked in an area where there was no indication this might happen.” Ben is now hoping to make a £5,000 claim on the company’s insurance to replace the van and the tools. A spokesman for Sita UK said: “This was an unfortunate incident and we have apologised to the owner of the vehicle. Our insurance company is now working to resolve this matter as quickly as possible.”