A motorist who was likely driving at more than five times the legal blood alcohol limit has lost his licence for four years in a string of impaired driving cases that plagued the city's court on Monday.
The male driver pleaded guilty in Warrnambool Magistrates Court to charges of drink-driving and driving unlicensed.
The court heard the man's blood sample came back with the high reading after he was treated in hospital for injuries acquired when he lost control of his ute driving along Blackwood Park Road in Simpson in February 2022.
A police prosecutor said the man recorded a blood-alcohol concentration of .171 in hospital but an expert had calculated it would have been between .214 and .258 at the time of driving.
The man was disqualified from driving for four years and fined $2050.
It came as a string of offenders were convicted of impaired driving.
A truck driver pleaded guilty to driving carelessly and under the influence of methamphetamine after losing control of his B-double truck in June 2022, crashing into a cattle farm fence and then a power pole at Macarthur.
The man tested positive to methamphetamine and admitted to feeling tired before the crash.
Magistrate Gerard Lethbridge said the man was lucky no one was killed.
"If there was an accident here where somebody was killed or seriously injured, both you and your employer would be ... facing significant terms of imprisonment," he said.
"This is outrageous behaviour for somebody who is employed as the driver of a B-double.
"There has been an over-representation of people in trucks in fatalities where methamphetamine has been found in their system."
The truck driver's licence was disqualified for 18 months and he was fined $2250.
In an unrelated case, a man blew .181 - more than three times the legal limit - after he crashed into trees in Camperdown's Mount Leura Road in July 2022.
He told the court he couldn't remember getting behind the wheel.
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Mr Lethbridge said the man, who has a prior conviction for drink-driving, would face nothing "short of imprisonment", if he re-offended again.
"Parliament has said to the court: 'jail people who persistently drink and drive because they kill people'," he said.
"This is outrageous behaviour. If it happens again, you're going to jail."
The driver was fined $1500 and banned from driving for 24 months.
The court also heard a 29-year-old Warrnambool man blew .119 on the way to get food near Colac in August 2022. He had a suspended licence and was caught drink-driving just two months earlier.
He was fined $1550 and disqualified from driving for 23 months.
Meanwhile, a Warrnambool motorist who tested positive to the drug ice in November 2020 was ordered to do 60 hours of unpaid community work and banned from driving for 12 months.
And a Portland man caught driving with ice and cannabis in his system in Port Fairy in August 2022 was fined $2000 and disqualified from driving for 24 months.
The Standard last week reported drink-drivers were responsible for more than half of the region's fatal crashes last year.
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