An emergency drain pipe repair that shut down Lenox Road caused a massive traffic jam that left motorists fuming during Friday’s morning commute.
The heavily traveled road is expected to be closed near Plantation Drive, between Lenox Square mall and I-85, through next Wednesday while city crews replace a collapsed stormwater pipe.
Signs on eastbound Lenox Road gave motorists a heads-up that the street was closed ahead, but motorists on the westbound side complained that signs warned of construction ahead, but gave no indication that the road was completely shut down and impassable, leading to gridlock as those motorists were forced to make u-turns at the barricades.
City officials, however, said there were ample signs warning that the road was closed.
At 11 a.m. Friday, an AJC photographer driving westbound on Lenox found no fewer than five signs between Buford Highway and the construction site warning that the road was closed ahead, and was open only to local traffic.
Psychiatrist Brian Bortnick got caught in the jam trying to get to his office.
“I spent literally 45 minutes at least just to get to the point where it’s closed,” Bortnick told the AJC. “We’re stuck here because you can’t turn around and go anywhere.”
Bortnick finally gave up and started walking.
“I have literally 30 patients in my waiting room right now,” Bortnick said. “I have patients freaking out on me, asking, ‘where are you?’”
“I just parked in the apartment complex because there’s nowhere to go,” he said. “If they had simply put ‘road blocked,’ I would have gone a different way.”
Molly Butler was also walking, but not by choice.
“I’m out of gas and walking to find a gas station,” Butler said, adding that her tank ran dry after sitting in the gridlock for about an hour.
The construction snafu also kept some school buses from making their morning routes on Friday.
“My daughter came outside to catch the bus at her normal time, and I just assumed she caught the bus,” Jennifer Douthitt said.
“ She came inside an hour later and the bus just never showed up,” Douthitt said. “I found out the bus didn’t come and pick up any of the kids on Lenox Road because they don’t have any detours set up, they don’t have any signs and nobody knows where to go.”
Police arrived on the scene at about shortly before 10 a.m. to clear up the traffic jam.
Janet Ward, spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Watershed Management, disputed the claims from motorists that there was inadequate signage during Friday's morning rush hour.
“There are ‘road closed’ signs out there,” Ward said Friday, adding that the road was also shut down on Thursday.
“Yesterday, what happened was we had a ‘road closed’ sign and [motorists] were just running right through it," Ward said.
"So we went back out there and put up detour signs because everybody was just blowing right through the road closed sign and they would get up there and the road was closed and they would have to turn around," she said. “There were signs and they were being ignored to a large extent. People don’t think the ‘road closed' signs apply to them.”
Dan O’Melia, who lives in a Lenox Road apartment complex, said he thought the confusion was likely due to large electronic signs on each end of Lenox that he said have been flashing the message for weeks that the road would be closed on Oct. 25 during the overnight hours.
“People who read ‘Road closed – 10-25-11--10p.m.-5a.m.’ would have no reason to believe that they’d be affected this morning,” O’Melia said in an e-mail.
Ward said that the construction project is being done this week because water leaking from the collapsed pipe was undercutting the road and engineers feared it might cause a sink hole.
“They wanted to get in there and get it done before the holidays,” she said.
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