Can You Believe This?
"A routine California Department of Transportation road repair project gone awry backed up traffic for about 25 miles Sunday, forcing drivers to endure delays of five hours or more and sparking a furious political backlash that has put Caltrans on the defensive. . . It all started with what should have been routine overnight road construction — tearing up worn slabs of concrete on the 10 Freeway and replacing them with fresh pavement.
The first problem was that Caltrans staff failed to inform the agency's public information office that roadwork was planned for that night, Caltrans spokeswoman Michelle Profant said.
The concrete slabs were being replaced on a roughly three-mile stretch of the westbound 10 in Banning, which is about 25 miles west of Palm Springs.
After most of the lanes closed Saturday at 10 p.m., workers tore up more of the road than they could replace on time.
That would have been enough of a problem. But then officials learned that a computer issue at a concrete plant in Cabazon had idled production.
"Nobody knew that there wasn't going to be any concrete" when the freeway was torn up, Profant said. Without new concrete to patch the road, a one-foot-deep gouge was left."
We tweet, we text, we spend endless hours on cell phones but nobody communicated the fact that there would be a problem ahead of time????
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