Were you late for work last Monday morning?
Of course you were, because the roads were in rough shape, particularly the highways with their overpasses that thousands of Oklahoma drivers use daily. A little freezing precipitation in the early hours of the morning just so happened to stick to elevated surfaces, including my own car, and the table was set for chaos.
According to reporting from KOCO, it appears the Oklahoma Department of Transportation’s sand and salt trucks were also late for work Dec. 1, which predictably resulted in hundreds of wrecks that brought traffic to a standstill in some parts of Oklahoma City. Of the 350 wrecks responded to by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, EMSA was requested for more than 100 of them.
“The highways and these junctions, I-40 to I-35, the I-35 to I-40 junction,” Donald Wood, EMSA’s field operation supervisor, told KOCO. “To my knowledge, I don’t know if they were pretreated, but we did see salt and sand trucks that were out there, and OHP did a really good job about directing them to where they needed to be.”
What was the Oklahoma Department of Transportation’s reasoning for the apparent lack of preparation? Well, I guess the state agency didn’t think the winter weather would be that bad, so they didn’t get out on the roads until well after the freezing rain had passed:
ODOT informed KOCO that they treated the roads Monday morning but not before the weather hit “due to forecasts trending lighter to no precipitation in the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metros.”
Go figure.
A highway commuter myself, it felt like Monday’s mayhem set the tone for the whole week. Drivers seemed extremely cautious over the next few days, which felt like it caused more problems — relatively minor fender benders, mostly — and slow traffic.
I’m hesitant to tell a government agency like ODOT to do a “better” job, because nobody likes a Tuesday-morning quarterback. But with winter weatherly squarely upon us and likely to cause similar situations over the next three months, perhaps we should all reevaluate where we stand with the phrase, “Better safe than sorry.”
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TPS report: Tulsa Public Schools gets the memo
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Too fast, too furious: Winter driving edition
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