Motorists stew, officials angered by gridlock debacle
The Virginian-Pilot
© July 3, 2009
Drivers found out Thursday just how bad gridlock in this region can get.
A broken water pump inside the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel set off a chain reaction of congestion. On the surface, the broken pump seemed like a tiny cog in the area’s complex interstate bridge and tunnel system, but what happened next was more than anyone had bargained for.
When the bridge-tunnel’s westbound lanes were closed, traffic congestion ended up stretching from morning to evening rush hours on the day before a busy holiday weekend.
While Virginia Department of Transportation crews pumped water out of the tunnel, detouring vehicles spilled onto alternate routes. Traffic at the Monitor Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel backed up more than 20 miles into Chesapeake. The Midtown and Downtown tunnel traffic was stacked up three to four miles into Norfolk, clogging city thoroughfares. The closures of some downtown streets for Harborfest compounded the fiasco.
Local leaders and others expressed outrage over the way VDOT handled the crisis and called the gridlock a harbinger of what could happen during a major evacuation.
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VDOT spokeswoman Lauren Hansen said crews worked as quickly as possible to remedy what was an unpredictable situation.
….The traffic was particularly rough on cargo carriers.
Meredith O’Keefe, assistant terminal manager for Gilco Trucking Co. in Portsmouth, said truckers, who have to criss-cross the region all day, couldn’t make as many trips .
….Dwight Farmer, executive director of the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, said Thursday was a “historic day for transportation.”
“If we don’t wake up after today, I don’t know what we will do.”
Transportation, city and business leaders have pushed since the 1990s for transportation improvements to provide additional access to the region and better hurricane evacuation routes. Those projects include another crossing of the Hampton Roads harbor, expanding the Midtown Tunnel and upgrading U.S. 460 to interstate quality.
But they will cost billions of dollars that current funding sources cannot cover. The General Assembly repeatedly has rejected proposals to raise taxes and fees for transportation funding.
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VDOT’s Hansen gave this account of what led to the tunnel’s closing:
A severe electrical and rain storm rolled across the bridge-tunnel Wednesday night, causing power outages and power surges. Apparently the power issues damaged a water main pump and possibly caused a water main break in the westbound tunnel. The malfunctions caused the pump house to fill with water, eventually overwhelming it and water seeped into the tunnel’s travel lanes.
The water pooled 4 to 6 inches deep at the mouth of the tunnel on the Hampton side. Tunnel staff were unaware of the problem until about 6:30 a.m. The problem was not detected earlier because the alarm system alerting the control room of a failure is electric and also malfunctioned. Water was shut off and the westbound lanes were closed.
“This is internal water – water from pipes around the tube,” Hansen said. Water mains run through the tunnels for fire suppression systems.
Crews worked into the evening using vacuum trucks to suck the water out of the travel lanes and the pump house before they could reach the source of the problem. Until crews can reach the water main and water pump, the precise damage could not be pinpointed. VDOT was able to reroute the water flow to another pumping system and took the faulty pump off line. One lane reopened at 2:30 p.m. and all were reopened by 7:30 p.m. Repairs will continue throughout the weekend, with at least one line closed over night.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with maintenance of the system – this is a break in the system, something that is not predictable,” Hansen said, adding that the pump system has a weekly maintenance schedule.
At the privately operated Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, tunnel pumps also have alarms that sound in the control room, said Robert Johnson, maintenance director.
The pump system, however, is manually checked multiple times a day.
“We put our hands on the pumps usually three times every eight hours to see if it’s running hot, to see if no current is going through,” Johnson said. “We like to have a hands-on rapport with our equipment and not rely on our sensors to take care of things.”
Fraim said the incident was reminiscent of Hurricane Isabel in September 2003, when the Midtown Tunnel flooded because of malfunctioning floodgates.
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