THE road toll touches hundreds of families across the country each year but perhaps none more tragically in 2014 than those who lost loved ones at Baranduda and Staghorn Flat.
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In January, two young girls, Emily and Brooke Salske, lost their lives in a single-vehicle crash on Baranduda Boulevard.
Aged 10 and 7, the girls had been travelling home with their father Shaun Salske from Baranduda Primary School where they had begun the new school year just two days earlier.
Almost immediately dozens of tributes of flowers and butterflies were left by the roadside for Emily and Brooke, whose mother Debbie Andrew said she had been touched by the kindness of her daughters’ classmates and the wider community.
A funeral for the sisters took the form of a children’s service with their friends asked to write messages to Emily and Brooke and place them in a memorial box at the front of the room.
The service heard how the girls were the best of friends and older sister Emily had dropped Brooke off at her classroom on the first day of school when she was feeling nervous.
It featured purple and yellow balloons,
the sisters’ favourite colours, and friends and classmates wore coloured ribbons in their hair and on their clothing.
Mourners heard how the sisters both loved dancing; how Emily, with an infectious laugh, had been renowned for her empathy and Brooke was mischievous but with the same kind traits.
Meanwhile in August, the region was rocked by a horrific collision between a petrol tanker trailer and two vehicles at Staghorn Flat in which a mother and her young son and another woman were killed.
Lisa Turner, 33, and her son Jack Wallace, 4, of Allans Flat, died when the tanker trailer separated from its prime mover and struck their Holden Captiva wagon.
Peta Cox, 67, of Yackandandah, was killed when the trailer struck her Mazda coupe.
Ms Turner had lived with her partner Damien Wallace for three years at Allans Flat and the couple had been together for 11 years.
They were engaged and Ms Turner was a nurse.
Their son Jack had grown up loving the outdoors and riding a small four-wheel electric motorbike.
Mrs Cox had worked at the Albury Tax Office and had lost her husband to cancer three years before.
She was known as a keen badminton player and ballroom dancer.
Energy giant BP responded to the tragedy by recalling its Victorian trucking fleet as a precaution, and its 20 BP-owned and operated trucks and trailers were inspected by VicRoads officers before they returned to the road.
