Woman gets parking ticket after a tree crushed her car

7:19am Monday 22nd January 2007

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A WOMAN whose car was crushed by a tree in Thursday's high winds went back the next day to find a parking ticket had been slapped on the car.

Nicky Clegg, from Stoulton, near Pershore, was driving along the Bromwich Road with her 82-year-old mother and her 11-year-old son when a tree fell across her car outside Christopher Whitehead Language College.

All three escaped unscathed, but the car windscreen was smashed, the bonnet crushed and both wing mirrors broken.

"I don't remember much, it happened really quick," Ms Clegg said.

"The people in the house over the road said to come in and other people had stopped basically because they couldn't cross the road."

She said police had asked if she could come back and get the car later that day but Ms Clegg had said she could not, so the officers had told her it was fine to leave it there.

But when the 42-year-old came back the following day, she found a parking ticket on the window.

And to add insult to injury, someone had smashed the passenger window and stolen her car stereo.

"I thought it was a notice saying it was okay it was there, but it was a parking ticket. I couldn't believe it," she added.

Julie Ashby, 47, who lives on the Bromwich Road, said she was outraged when she saw it.

And June Mawby, also from Bromwich Road, who took the family in after the accident, said it was "absolutely dreadful."

"If I had gone out when I saw him there, I would have hit him, I was so incensed," she said.

Worcester City Council's head of property services Mike O'Grady, said he did not have the specific details of the case, but it was not unusual for cars, including abandoned or damaged vehicles, to be parked illegally.

"If, however, this case is as reported then I have no doubt once the full facts are known the appeals team will treat the case sympathetically," he said.

"We do urge all our attendants to take a common sense approach to parking enforcement and I am sure we can sort out this issue amicably when the vehicle owner contacts us."