{"id":371148,"date":"2025-08-25T01:42:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T01:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/371148\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T01:42:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T01:42:16","slug":"lives-torn-apart-by-fatal-crashes-on-the-a9-scotlands-longest-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/371148\/","title":{"rendered":"Lives torn apart by fatal crashes on the A9, Scotland’s longest road"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven McKenzie<\/p>\n

BBC Scotland News<\/p>\n

\"ChrisChris Strong<\/p>\n

Katie Bastion-Strong, who died in a crash on the A9 in 2022, pictured with her husband Chris and their daughters<\/p>\n

A dream trip to Scotland ended in tragedy for Chris Strong’s family.<\/p>\n

His wife Katie had travelled from the US to the Highlands with her brother and their mother to visit locations from their favourite TV show, Outlander.<\/p>\n

But they never came home. All three were killed in a crash on the notorious A9 in August 2022.<\/p>\n

Their deaths were another statistic in the grim history of Scotland’s longest trunk road.<\/p>\n

A total of 48 people have lost their lives on the 113-mile stretch between Inverness and Perth in the last 10 years.<\/p>\n

The road regularly changes from single to dual carriageway. Drivers can often be seen driving at excessive speeds to overtake lines of slower-moving vehicles, and at certain junctions cars have to turn right across traffic coming the other way.<\/p>\n

The work to dual the remaining single-carriageway sections was originally due to be finished by 2025 – but that deadline has slipped by a decade to 2035.<\/p>\n

\"ChrisChris Strong<\/p>\n

Chris said his wife was the “glue” that held the great things about his family together<\/p>\n

Chris Strong, who lives in Chicago with the couple’s three daughters, has told BBC Alba’s E\u00f2rpa programme<\/a> of the painful lasting impact of the deaths.<\/p>\n

He said his wife Katie was “the glue that held all the great elements of our families together”.<\/p>\n

“She was beautiful, and she was the hardest working person I’d ever met,” he said.<\/p>\n

“She never sat still and was so ambitious and was always learning and always in school. She was always taking care of people.”<\/p>\n

Chris, a photographer, says he keeps memories of Katie and her family alive.<\/p>\n

“We try to talk about her a lot. I feel like she’s still a presence in our home.”<\/p>\n

\"ChrisChris Strong<\/p>\n

Chris said he still felt Katie’s presence in his family’s home<\/p>\n

Katie was 46 when she visited Scotland with her 45-year-old brother, Jared Bastion, and their mother, Mary-Lou Mauch.<\/p>\n

They were all fans of Outlander, which they had watched together while caring for their late father David while he suffered with dementia.<\/p>\n

During their trip they had visited Culloden Battlefield near Inverness, one of the locations from the show.<\/p>\n

They were on a single carriageway section of the A9 south of Aviemore when their car was involved in a collision with a lorry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mary-Lou and Jared died at the scene. Katie, who was driving the car, died in hospital four days later.<\/p>\n

The lorry driver was not hurt.<\/p>\n

Chris said: “I don’t know why it happened.<\/p>\n

“She was going to make a right-hand turn off of the A9, and she turned right in front of a lorry.”<\/p>\n

Chris got the next plane to Scotland after he found out about the crash.<\/p>\n

Katie was receiving treatment in a hospital in Dundee.<\/p>\n

Chris said: “I was able to get there in time to see her. She was on a ventilator.<\/p>\n

“I got to spend maybe 24 hours with her.<\/p>\n

“Then they did tests and determined that she was not going to come back.”<\/p>\n

Head-on collision<\/p>\n

\"Ronnie<\/p>\n

Ronnie Weir was left injured by a crash on the A9 in Perthshire<\/p>\n

Others have experienced tragedy on the A9 first-hand.<\/p>\n

Ronnie Weir, who lives only a few metres away from the road in Dowally, Perthshire, was involved in an accident in April 2017.<\/p>\n

He was driving home from Pitlochry when a car came towards him on the wrong side of the road. They collided head-on.<\/p>\n

The driver of the other vehicle had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at the wheel before the crash.<\/p>\n

Ronnie, who suffered leg injuries, said he felt the effects of the accident every day.<\/p>\n

“The trauma which an accident causes is horrendous. Sometimes it is difficult to speak about it,” he said.<\/p>\n

\"Elaine<\/p>\n

Lorry driver Elaine McKenzie says her faith is important to her when she prepares for journeys on the A9<\/p>\n

Lorry driver Elaine MacKenzie is a regular user of the road – and says she prays every time she sets out on the A9.<\/p>\n

She said: “I pray for myself, for my lorry, but also for everyone else with me too – for everyone on the A9, but especially for the lorries.”<\/p>\n

Elaine believed there were lots of factors behind accidents on the A9.<\/p>\n

She said some drivers did not understand the road signs, while others tried to overtake her lorry in dangerous places.<\/p>\n

“If the road was dualled all the way from Inverness to Perth it would be very different,” she added.<\/p>\n

“Because then cars could overtake me if they wanted, and you wouldn’t have to be worried.”<\/p>\n

A total of 48 people died between 2014 and 2024 after collisions on the A9 between Inverness and Perth, according to Scottish government data which E\u00f2rpa received through Freedom of Information.<\/p>\n

More than 80% of those who lost their lives had been on parts of the road that were not dual carriageway.<\/p>\n

Over the same 10 years, 558 other people were involved in collisions. More than 80% of them were on sections which were not dualled.<\/p>\n

The SNP made a commitment in 2007 to dual the A9 from Inverness to Perth, and in 2011 the Scotish government set a target date of 2025.<\/p>\n

But in February 2023, ministers admitted that finishing the \u00a33bn project by then was “unachieveable”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ten months later, the government said that completing the work had been delayed by 10 years until 2035<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the time the transport secretary, Mairi McAllan, said that a new rolling programme of improvements was “achievable” and there would be “no let up” in the work.<\/p>\n

Two sections of single carriageway totalling 11 miles (18km) of road have been upgraded over the past decade – but 77 miles of the route has still to be dualled.<\/p>\n

A9 Dual Action Group campaigner Laura Hansler, who lives near the road where it passes through the Cairngorms, said she knew the road building project was complex.<\/p>\n

But she added: “Every time there is a delay… you’re basically going to cause someone else and another family to lose their loved one on this road.”<\/p>\n

\"Fiona<\/p>\n

Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop said the Scottish government has a plan to complete the dualling project<\/p>\n

Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop said she understood there were frustrations around the dualling of the road.<\/p>\n

“Any loss of a life on the A9, or indeed other roads in Scotland, is a tragedy in and of itself,” she said<\/p>\n

“Road safety is something I take extremely seriously.”<\/p>\n

She said the government was not just waiting for the dulling to take place, and had invested \u00a35m in interim, shorter-term road safety issues on the A9.<\/p>\n

“The dualling in and of itself will help on road safety and that’s one of the reasons that we’ve embarked on it,” she said.<\/p>\n

Hyslop said circumstances beyond the Scottish government’s control had affected the project, including Brexit – the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union – and the Covid pandemic.<\/p>\n

But she added: “We have a plan, we’re meeting our milestones.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steven McKenzie BBC Scotland News Chris Strong Katie Bastion-Strong, who died in a crash on the A9 in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5009],"tags":[748,4884,712,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-371148","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scotland","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-scotland","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115086868446479426","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}