One of the worst commutes in the country just got a whole lot worse. An accident Thursday night involving a tractor trailer carrying 12,000 gallons of home heating oil resulted in a spectacular fire. Heat from the blaze melted a recently built overpass, shutting down both sides of the highway for and optimistically estimated 2-3 weeks.

Official estimates are that the damaged section of highway is used by 120,000 vehicles a day - including mine twice, on the way to and from work.

On a typical day during rush hour traffic through the Bridgeport stretch of I95 is three lanes packed solid and moving at an average 3 mph. (I tend to laugh at this as I commute in the opposite direction of the rush typically at about 70 mph.)

If you want to get a full picture of the impact this is having just imagine 120,000 vehicles searching for an alternate route through city streets. The official detour was hell and not really much of an option. 3 lanes of rush hour traffic shuffled onto 1 city street.

WNBC has a great slide show of the disaster complete with captions and descriptions. Or if you just want pictures I copied some of the better ones into the extended entry.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 01:26 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment

1 Oy.

No way that's gonna get fixed in three weeks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 27, 2004 11:36 PM (+S1Ft)

2 There is a slight possibility. The entire area of the wreck has been under massive reconstruction for a couple of years which basically involved building a stretch of new highway along side the existing one. Routing one direction of traffic over this new bridge and rebuilding the old. The part that suffered the worst damage was new.

I believe the plan is to build as temporary highway by filling in the street under the bridge and paving it over. Then just repeat the previous reconstruction cycle.

The northbound side received significantly less damage than the southbound and could be re-opened in a few days. I give them about a 75% chance on the southbound side. They are working 24-7 and if the weather is good they can probably do it.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at March 28, 2004 03:57 AM (CSxVi)

3 Ah.

Yes, it helps a lot if you can fill in the street underneath.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 28, 2004 07:02 PM (kOqZ6)

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