Monday - August 12, 2013

stuck here for awhile: Jersey Gridlock

There’s a tank truck fire on the highway 3 miles away. Rt 78 is closed in both directions. We live near the highway, so when traffic gets bad all the “smart” drivers try to get around the jam by taking local roads. Now all those roads are jammed to.  So I can’t get in, or out. Even the main road through our condo park is bumper to bumper, and it’s a private road. Not that that stops people from using us as a short cut.

Hope they get it fixed soon. Not that I was going anywhere ... well, maybe to the grocery store. We can always have peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, or some canned tuna. This is just another time when life in NJ, which is pretty congested to begin with, even out here in the sticks (we have cows on the farm one hill over from us), gets annoying. And it’s only the middle of the afternoon, that slack period before rush hour starts around 4:30. Looks like there’s an 8 mile tailback already to the East. If it builds up another 7 miles (not hard to do at all) it will hit Rt 287, and that will gridlock the entire center of the state. It’s happened before, believe you me. No telling how far west the jam extends, but there isn’t much out that way, other than Pennsylvania. Rt 31, the local north-south highway, is already frozen at least a few miles north and south of Rt 78.

I’ve heard rumors that in some places way out west, or on certain streets in quaint English villages out in the country, only a car or two a day go by. Times like this make those rumors pretty hard to believe.

UNION TWP. — The westbound lanes of Route 78 are closed between Exits 13 and 12, as firefighters respond to calls of a tractor-trailer on fire near mile marker 14.4.

Responding crews were told to enter the highway at Johnny’s truck stop and travel east in the westbound lanes to reach the site of the fire.

A hazmat crew was called to the scene to handle a spill of diesel fuel into a storm drain.

The initial call about the tractor-trailer fire was dispatched shortly before 2:30 p.m., according to unconfirmed radio reports.

Nah, that’s wrong. Marker 14.4 is just west of exit 15 at the end of my piece of Rt 173. I can see exit 13 from the top of our hill, and traffic is blocked way west of there. Johnny’s is at exit 12. If the accident was where they say, that part of the westbound highway would be empty. Pretty sure it’s west of exit 12, maybe as far as exit 11.

Yeah, we have exits nearly every mile. There’s just that much density around here.

update: fire is out, one lane open, but it’s too late. Traffic backup extends halfway across the state (which is all of 63 miles wide in our part here).

Guess it wasn’t a tanker truck after all. I still think this is west of exit 12. The land flattens out there; exit 12 is almost at the top of a hill.

Update: Nope, I was thinking mile marker 15.4. I went past the burned spot today, and it was west of exit 13 between marker 14.4 and 14.3. And it turns out that it was a truckload of diapers that burned up.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/12/2013 at 02:33 PM   
Filed Under: • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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