Car smashes into house in the wet

An out-of-control car smashed through the front of a Black Country house, leaving a gaping hole in the living room.

See more pics of the crash in the gallery below.

The blue Citroen C2 skidded off the wet road after coming round the bend in Hawes Lane, Rowley Regis, skidding across the front garden and into the house, reducing a section of the wall to rubble and narrowly missing the homeowners' new television.

Nobody was in the room at the time of the accident at around 2pm on Saturday, as owner Kevin Priest was upstairs with his two sons Matthew, 13, and Steven, 16, setting up a new printer, while wife Liz was out at work.

The driver of the car, a woman from Sheldon in Birmingham, was taken to Russells Hall Hospital with a minor arm injury caused by the air bag going off, while her passenger was taken to the same hospital on a spinal board with a minor lower back injury. Both were later discharged.

It was the latest in a string of accidents along the section of Hawes Lane, near to the junction with St Lukes Close, with another car involved in a near miss earlier that day, skidding off the road and wiping out a bush in the front garden.

Mr Priest, 52, a section leader at Quinton manufacturing firm Ishida, said his fence had been wiped out three times in recent months by cars careering off the road, while his next door neighbour's house suffered similar damage last year when a vehicle smashed into his front room.

A lamp post outside Mr Priest's house had recently been removed, because it kept being knocked over.

He said: "We've been onto the council for ages about putting speed restrictions or something onto this bend, but they won't do anything.

"We'd been out in Oldbury to get a printer and had not been in that long. I was just upstairs and we heard a bang.

"It was quite loud and it shook the house. I didn't know what had happened, it took me by surprise.

"I drive round that bend every day and I've never had a problem with it."

Next-door-neighbour Melvin Goode, aged 59, was at work at the time but reckoned there had been around 40 accidents along that stretch in the 30 years he had lived there.

He added: "A car went into my house as well last year."

Two cars were involved in a separate collision further down the same route, shortly before 3.30pm where Hawes Lane turns into Rowley Village, at its junction with Church Road, as the weekend rain made for treacherous conditions.

A yellow MG crashed into a blue Ford Escort.