VICTORIA Police have released the results from their Easter road blitz, recording 67 speeding offences throughout the Northern Grampians Service Area.
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Operation Nexus began midnight Thursday April 18 and ended 11.59pm on Easter Monday.
A total of 11,674 offences were detected across the state.
Locally, the worst incident was a fatality, which occurred early on Good Friday, when A 55 -year-old South Australian man driving through Armstrong on the Western Highway left the road and struck a tree around 6.30am.
The man died at the scene.
Another two incidents unfolded in the district the same day, but fortunately there were no more fatalities locally.
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Across the Northern Grampians police service area, police recorded:
- two drink driving offences;
- two disqualified drivers behind the wheel;
- one unlicensed driver behind the wheel;
- 67 speeding offences;
- four disobeying traffic control;
- 10 driving unregistered vehicles.
Northern Grampians Highway Patrol Acting Sergeant Sam McCaskill said that the long weekend got off to an upsetting start but the rest of it was otherwise comparable to previous years.
"The start wasn't good at all," he said.
"The rest of the weekend we had some big events with the Stawell Gift, the Rodeo, and the Stawell Cup and everyone was pretty well behaved.
"Overall the statistics were about average.
"We did get some drug tested and some fines for speeding, mobile phones - just your standard offences but overall for the amount of people on the road for the weekend, obviously the start was no good but (it was standard.)"
Sergeant McCaskill said fatigue was another driver behaviour police encountered.
"You've got people travelling long distances so fatigue is always going to be a major issue," he said.
"We had as much coverage as we could with the units out on the road to try and curb that fatigue issue, but it's always going to be an issue unfortunately."
State wide there were three fatalities, bringing the road toll to 101 for the year to date, compared to 61 for the same period in 2018.
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