A tragic death, a monumental traffic jam

JAM RELIEF

Rex Arul, who commutes from Smyrna to Dunwoody, said he found a productive way to sit through the gridlock on I-285 Thursday.

“I dealt with today’s traffic jam by practicing math tables with my 7-year old daughter through my bluetooth car phone,” Arul wrote in an email to the AJC. “As a new Nissan Leaf owner for a month, there wasn’t any guilt in being held up in traffic this morning, as it is environment-friendly and even runs better under these conditions. I just used this traffic mess to help my child with her math.”

Arul said he was sorry about the woman who was killed.

Sandy Springs police closed all westbound lanes of I-285 near Roswell Road Thursday morning because a pedestrian was killed on the roadway, but the police waited nearly an hour before calling in the Fulton County medical examiner, the ME’s office said.

In the meantime, the lane closings at rush hour led to a monumental traffic jam that paralyzed much of northern metro Atlanta. Eastbound traffic on I-285 backed up for five miles, all the way to I-75, which then backed up as well. Ga. 400 turned to ice. I-85 jammed next as the backup on westbound 285 reached seven miles. Nearby surface streets also gridlocked.

Gayla Joyce Walker, 53, of Dunwoody, died early Thursday when she stepped out onto the westbound lanes of the Perimeter Highway, Sandy Springs police said. The first vehicle to strike her was big, maybe a semi truck, and it never stopped, the police said. She was then struck multiple times, her body torn apart, by drivers who may not have known they were running over a person. A call to Sandy Springs police just after 6 a.m. reported an animal in the road. The police said they closed all westbound lanes at 6:35 a.m.

The ME’s office didn’t receive the call until about 7:30 a.m., it said. The scene of a death can’t be cleared until the ME’s investigator has processed it and removed the body.

“When something like that happens, by Georgia law, we’re supposed to be notified immediately of a death, not hours later,” said Betty Honey, an investigator for the Fulton medical examiner’s office. “But that happens with all the police jurisdictions. That’s how they operate.”

Sandy Springs police Sgt. Ronald Momon, the department spokesman, would not say.

“Not sure when they were notified,” he said in an email to an AJC reporter Thursday evening.

The impact of a traffic disaster

The bottleneck triggered by the death of Gayla Walker set in motion the unforgiving physics of Atlanta traffic, rippling outward for miles to ensnare commuters in all directions.

Gretchen Stringer, 22, left her Johns Creek home at 8:15 a.m., more than two hours after Walker died. Her daily commute to downtown Atlanta is always bad, 90 minutes on a good day, and it quickly went south on Thursday.

She never saw the scene of Walker’s death, didn’t even come close to the epicenter of the jam. But eight interstate miles away, Stringer found her own piece of commuting hell.

“People were driving crazy because they were late for work,” she said.

It had taken her an hour and a half just to get from home to I-85 south at Chamblee Tucker Road. The car in front of her braked sharply and Stringer plowed into it. Both airbags on her aging Corolla blew, and the car was totaled.

A police officer told her the driver in front of her had been distracted by another accident they passed moments earlier, Stringer said.

“I don’t have enough saved up for another car,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m going to get to work. I can’t go to work today. I can’t make money. Now, I don’t know what kind of car I can get. It’s a whole list of events I have to worry about now.”

Sandy Springs: ‘We had no choice’

Sgt. Momon of the Sandy Springs police said earlier Thursday that the first call, a report of a dead animal in the road, came in shortly after 6 a.m.

After closing the lanes, officers were spread out over about a quarter-mile of the interstate, marking the location of body parts and other evidence.

“We’re required to do a thorough investigation,” Momon said. “We had no choice.”

The decision to close the road was made by the supervisor on duty; Momon said the department notified the state Department of Transportation minutes after deciding to close the road – the DOT confirmed the timing – and sent an alert to other local police agencies.

DOT spokeswoman Karlene Barron said the agency began updating its digital road signs to warn drivers of the closings just a few minutes after hearing from one of its HERO units that there was a human fatality and that all westbound lanes were cut off.

“We believe that we moved quickly with the timeline,” Barron said.

Impact on businesses minor

Thousands of crises, major and minor, played out on the highways Thursday, as Atlanta commuters missed appointments, lost work time and even got into crashes of their own.

David Schrank, a research scientist with the Texas Transportation Institute, said long-lasting interstate shutdowns can spark backups on roads far from the initial problem. People 20 or 30 miles away can be diverted from their normal commutes, he said.

Businesses reported some inconvenience but few lasting effects from the jam.

Sandy Springs-based UPS said some employees were late to work, but a spokesman said the company was able to deliver packages on time Thursday. Incoming packages had arrived at UPS before the jam occurred; and outgoing deliveries mostly didn’t go out until the worst of the traffic was done.

At Northside Hospital, a few surgeries and scheduled baby deliveries were delayed briefly because some patients had trouble getting through the traffic, spokeswoman Katherine Watson said.

‘It’s like this every day. It’s ridiculous’

Gretchen Stringer’s Toyota Corolla, practically a family heirloom with 213,000 miles, was towed away from the accident scene.

Stringer, a paralegal downtown who also is attending classes at Georgia State, said she sees her accident as one piece of the fallout from the I-285 traffic jam. The worse-than-normal traffic meant lots of people – including her – were late for work, and that increased the likelihood of accidents.

Her boyfriend, Jake Blackstone, said it took him 45 minutes to drive 11 miles to reach Stringer at the accident scene.

“People probably lost their jobs today because they were late,” he said.

On the side of the road, after a police officer pulled away from the swept up crash scene, Stringer pointed to cars passing by, watching as they darted across lanes.

“It’s like this every day,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”