A moving lorry overturned onto a house in the Medithale area along the Badulla–Mahiyangana road on Saturday afternoon, Hiru News reported.
Injured people were taken to hospital by Suwa Seriya ambulances. Police and the army mounted an operation to locate anyone trapped beneath the debris of the crash, Hiru’s correspondent said.
What Ada Derana reported
Ada Derana subsequently reported that four people were injured and that no deaths occurred. According to that account, a container truck travelling from Badulla towards Mahiyangana suffered brake failure, veered off the road, struck a three-wheeler parked at the roadside and plunged roughly 75 feet down a precipice before coming to rest on a house belonging to the Road Development Authority.
A father and son who were inside the house, along with the truck driver and his assistant, were seriously injured and admitted to Badulla Teaching Hospital. Police are investigating.
Ada Derana’s site returns a CloudFront block from our fetchers, so that report could not be retrieved and dated directly and is not listed among the sources below. Its account also differs from Hiru’s in describing the vehicle as a container truck rather than a lorry, and in adding the fall down the precipice, which Hiru does not mention.
A recurring failure on hill-country roads
Brake failure on descending grades is a repeated cause of serious crashes in the hill country. On Thursday a lorry ran out of control at Kolathenna and came to rest on a railway line after its brakes failed.
Not reported
Neither account gives the time of the crash, the condition of the four injured, or whether anyone remained unaccounted for when the search ended. It is not stated whether the house was occupied as a residence or in use by the Road Development Authority, how many people were inside, or whether the structure has been declared unsafe. No cause beyond the reported brake failure has been confirmed by police, and no vehicle examiner’s finding has been published.
