Fire fighters who have to battle with weekly crashes on the congested single carriageway of the A11 have thrown their weight behind a campaign to push the government to finally get the road dualled.

Fire fighters who have to battle with weekly crashes on the congested single carriageway of the A11 have thrown their weight behind a campaign to push the government to finally get the road dualled.

Thetford's fire crews are called out at least once a week to crashes on the yet to be dualled eight-mile stretch of the busy trunk road between Thetford and Barton Mills.

The horrendous traffic build up also regularly hinders their response times to potentially fatal crashes or fires.

Now their leading fire fighter has backed Norfolk County Council's campaign to push the government to get the road dualled.

Watch manager Pete Fullalove and his crew added their signatures to thousands of others from people across Norfolk and the world on a petition calling for the road dualled.

He said: “It can put a good three to five minutes on our response time, which is a lot it terms of getting to an emergency.

“If there are any road collisions on that stretch the congestion that that causes seriously impedes our vehicles reaching the scene at an early stage.”

He said a main factor in accidents was that people come off a dual carriageway onto the single carriageway but don't adjust their speed.

Once a crash happens, it has a concertina affect and results in many vehicles being affected.

“There was one on Tuesday morning where two cars and two HGVs crashed in to each other,” he said. “The ensuing congestion meant we really had to slow the vehicle down, proceed with care and wait for other vehicles to move out of the way.”

It is made doubly worse for fire engines, which need more space to get through.

“As a response vehicle we could proceed down the outside quite freely if it was dual carriageway,” he said.

Fire crews at Mildenhall and Brandon face the same problems, especially at Brandon where the town becomes solid with traffic avoiding the single carriageway.