A grief-stricken husband who lost his wife, mother-in-law and brother-in-law in a crash on the killer A9 has told of his horror that it could be years before the road is upgraded.
Katie Bastion-Strong, 46, her brother Jared Bastion, 45, and mum Mary-Lou Mauch, 75, were touring Scotland to check out filming sites for Outlander when their car crashed head-on into a lorry last August.
Katie’s husband Chris Strong said the tragedy – put down to road conditions – left seven children without a parent.
He said: “More can be done to make that road safer and they have to do it. My daughters have lost their mum, Jared’s four children have lost their dad. This has to stop before more families’ lives are ruined.”
The Scottish Government has said they cannot guarantee to meet their promise to dual 70 miles of the A9 between Perth and Inverness by 2025.
Chris’s family are three out of the 17 people killed on the road in the past year – the most lethal 12 months for the A9 in 15 years.
The family had been fans of the hit TV show Outlander and travelled to the Highlands from Illinois in the US to see where it was set.
Katie, who worked for the American College of Surgeons, was driving a rental car on the A9 at Ralia, near Newtonmore, Inverness-shire, when she turned a corner and hit the lorry.
Her brother and mum were killed instantly, while she was taken to hospital, where she died three days later.
Hours before the tragedy, Jared had shared a video of the trip on social media and wrote they had been “white knuckle driving” around the Isle of Skye on a single carriageway road with “traffic going both ways”.
Chris, 45, flew over to Scotland as soon as he could and said he was shocked by the road’s condition.
He said: “I went to the site of the accident. Physically, I saw that, I went there. As someone looking at it from the US, everything’s flipped. That’s confusing.
“It’s also very small, the road. It’s not at all like the roads here.
“There was no division between the lanes and there’s a quick turn with no warning.
“The police officer who was with me told me about how dangerous the road is.”
Scottish Government ministers have pledged to dual the A9 for decades, with the latest promise to widen the stretch between Perth and Inverness made in 2011.
Despite the Government promising to complete the work by 2025, just 11 miles have been finished.
Transport Minister Jenny Gilruth admitted earlier this month that the process would now be delayed.
Experts have said it could be 2050 before the remaining 70 miles are completed and have questioned the Government’s efforts to make progress.
Chris said he was told it was driver error that caused the tragedy and, when he saw the road conditions, he could understand the difficulties his wife would have had on it.
Chris and Katie were married for 17 years and lived in Chicago with their three daughters Bela, 17, Mae, 15, and Gillian, 10.
He said she was his “best friend” and added: “She loved travelling, the outdoors, she had a lot of plans. We have three daughters and Jared has four children. It has just been a lot to deal with, it’s been terrible.
“I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what we have.”
He said Katie, Jared and Mary-Lou had bonded over Outlander while they were caring for Mary-Lou’s husband David the year before, when he was suffering from dementia.
Chris said: “Mary-Lou’s husband passed away in August of 2021 and Katie had spent the summer with her mum and Jared caring for him. One thing they did while they were looking after David, because they had a lot of time just kind of sitting around caring for him, they somehow really got into Outlander.
“After David passed away, Mary-Lou got pretty down so Katie and Jared wanted to take her on a trip to just give her a good time and they chose Scotland because they all love the scenery in that show.
“They were only there for about four days before the accident.”
Chris said there also should be more checks or safety signs for drivers who are unfamiliar with the roads in the UK. He added: “I’m surprised that your driver’s licence can just work here, that you can just jump on a plane from the US and rent a car and be driving with everything completely reversed from what you’re used to, just all on good faith that you’re going to be able to wing it.”
Chris’s concerns have been supported by Fergus Ewing who is the MSP for Inverness and Nairn and sees the A9 run through much of his constituency. The ex-government minister has criticised his SNP colleagues for delays to the upgrade.
He voted against his Government on Wednesday in a vote on dualling the road and said he will “most likely” be disciplined.
He told the Sunday Mail: “This is utterly unacceptable. If I go to my constituents in the Highlands and say, ‘Well, we’ll do it by 2050,’ they will say, ‘Well, you’re out,’ and they’d be quite right because this is my job. The positive news is that the industry says there are the people and the companies that can do the work, they want to do the work. There just needs to be a total change in the way the procurement is done.”
Ewing said he has secured an agreement in principle from the petitions committee this week to hold an inquiry, to “work out what went wrong and, more importantly, how we put it right and get the job done ASAP”.
He has been working alongside Scottish Labour’s Rhoda Grant and Scottish Conservative Murdo Fraser.
Fraser revealed he had been involved in a collision on the A9 in 1990, spending weeks in hospital with multiple fractures.
He said: “More people will die this year, and next year, and the one after, as this SNP promise is not delivered.” Transport Scotland was asked to respond to the criticism.
A spokesman referred to comments made by Gilruth on February 8, when she told MSPs the Scottish Government had an “unwavering commitment to delivering the benefits of the completed A9 dualling programme”.
She said dualling would “fundamentally improve road safety on the A9, as well as the lives of people who live in communities alongside the route”.
She added: “The Scottish Government’s resolute commitment to full dualling of the A9 remains absolute.”
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