SNAFU

ONGOING UPDATES: CalTrans blew it big and now everybody is on-board for making sure this does not happen again, citing the "national emergency" nature of shutting down a major US highway to ... fill potholes. It does not matter what caused the problem; the issue is why it continued to worsen over the period of 12 hours. There is a contingency plan in place, but no one recognized the severity of the situation and then took action to deal effectively with the existing conditions. It may well be that the head of CalTrans will be replaced before all the hearings scheduled for the next several weeks are concluded. I believe that's called "accountability," a rare commodity indeed these days.

SNAFU is an acronym for "situation normal: all f'd up." We had a major SNAFU on I-10 this past Sunday, a SNAFU that caused a 25-mile back-up ultimately of 8 lanes of traffic involving thousands and thousands of unaware and unprepared motorists. Nope, not an accident this time: people understand a major traffic accident. This time, it was a CalTrans crew filling potholes in Banning.

The crew began scheduled work during the night Saturday, work that was set to be completed early Sunday morning; however, the crew did not finish the job, so they stayed on the freeway and continued to work at what some motorists have called a "leisurely pace" throughout the day Sunday. When the 10,000 people who were in town for the major biking event started to leave, the already normally heavy weekend traffic came to a standstill from Banning to Palm Springs -- roughly the same distance as it is from the CA coast to Catalina island: 26 miles.

Again we had travelers without options because there are limited travel alternatives in case of emergency. And, apparently, no one thought to go to the job site and tell the workers to pick up the cones and get the hell off the freeway before traffic backed up all the way to Phoenix! Why? Because, evidently, no one at either CalTrans or the Highway Patrol knew what was happening on I-10 Sunday.

Motorists missed flights, ran out of gas, had no food/water with them, had to go potty alongside the road, and escalated the traffic nightmare by going the wrong way against traffic, traveling in the emergency lane, bunching up on the shoulder of the road -- all in an effort to find a way off the freeway. Some motorists got off the freeway west and turned back east, but that soon jammed up the eastbound, as well as the westbound traffic. Unfortunately, options are few, and, for several miles, non-existent, so once the situation develops, there is nothing to do but wait it out.

In this case, however, the situation never needed to develop as it is a result of bad judgment.

The workers were well aware of the traffic conditions they created and the supervisor should have been at the site to assess the progress on the job and make a decision whether to continue or come back later. CalTrans has apologized -- in a news release -- but is that enough? Saying "sorry" only feels right to the person who says it to excuse inappropriate and/or unacceptable behavior. If there is no dire consequence for this kind of SNAFU, there is nothing to prevent it from happening again.

We all need to relearn the value of stepping up and speaking out when things go wrong. "Someone" should have said, "Hey, this is a nightmare! Let's pack up our stuff and open these lanes." Do what needs to be done when it needs to be done and deal with the aftermath ... afterward. The consequences for making a judgment call in a situation that necessitated common sense to over-rule a job order could not be worse than the damage done to CalTran's reputation this past Sunday afternoon.

If nothing else, these workers put their lives at risk, as well as the safety of the thousands of vehicles caught in the middle of the mess.

UPDATE: After dozens of horror stories and complaints from motorists and local politicians, the head of CalTrans informed the media this afternoon that the workers involved in the SNAFU have been demoted, not fired. No details have been shared because "it's a personnel matter" and cannot be publicly disclosed. Everyone/everywhere is calling for action, not apologies, so we'll see what happens.