Anyone know what happened on the M25 today between J10 and J14, or between J14 and J10? Lots of sirens. Reports of traffic chaos.
HJ
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Gas leak near the Runnymede Hotel apparently
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8222521.stm
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Couldn't the gas have been turned off rather than closing the motorway?
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" Gas leak near the Runnymede Hotel apparently"
Must have been a very large main to incur a 200m exclusion zone which obviously impinged on the M25. Its not easy as turning off a household gas tap.There is more to it. The ground/road needs to be dug up.
Temporary repair used to get the M25 open.
As for the BBC article, the gridlocking happens because of inadequate traffic management in any area that suffers a major incident. There needs to be a definitive plan executed by the appropriate authorities to stop gridlocking on local diversions and override traffic light junctions using police to get everyone moving. Shutting the motorway and allowing the traffic to battle around the local streets is madness and frustrating.
Edited by Honestjohn on 27/08/2009 at 00:38
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Look the Runnymede hotel up on Google Earth and you can see how close it is to the M25. But I still wonder quite how big a gas explosion would have had to be to affect the M25. I lived in Putney when a mansion block went up on Putney Hill. Devastating destruction. People were killed. But the damage was confined to the block. Yesterday, we had a situation where the M25 carries traffic to Heathrow as well as around London. How many flights were missed as a result of this closure? What was the true level of disruption? How much stress was caused and how much damage did that do to people? I guess Health & Safety will reply that there could have been a major disaster. But how much of a disaster could there have been had the M25 remained open and the gas main exploded? Once again, unaccountable numbers of people have been stressed (which is a killer in itself, ask your GP), unaccountable hours have been lost, unaccountable money has been sacrificed by a decision that proved to be completely unnecessary anyway.
(It was a 3 hour peak time closure from midday until 15.00.)
HJ
Edited by Honestjohn on 27/08/2009 at 13:32
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proved to be completely unnecessary anyway.
I don't think that's fair - I didn't crash the last time I drove the car, or the time before, but I'm still going to wear a seatbelt next time.
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If you were in charge of the situation and were told say that the chance of an explosion affecting the M25 was say 1 in 100,000 what would you do?
I suspect you would say - best be on the safe side and close the road. You would think "If I leave the road open and there is an explosion that will be the end of my career."
Officials will always take the "safe" option rather than base their decision on a logical assessment of risk because the public does not understand risk and they cannot be criticised for taking the safe option.
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If you were in charge of the situation and were told say that the chance of an explosion affecting the M25 was say 1 in 100 000 what would you do?
Just to clarify my previous post, it's ok to say beforehand that "we're not going to close the road because we've done a risk assessment and the chance of X is 1 in 100 000". But it's not ok to say after "it was wrong to close the road because X didn't happen".
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.... the chance of an explosion .... was say 1 in 100,000 what would you do? ...
I suspect you would say - best be on the safe side and close the road. .. >>
I am glad that people like that are not in charge of running our petrochemical industries and power stations. Otherwise, they would be shut down 99% of the time, the 1% remainder being the time they would spend being started up and then shut down immediately. If people like that were in charge of approving the production and transport of LPG and LNG, none of the stuff would get produced let alone moved. Use of acetylene would be banned completely.
Real risk and its perceived risk are hard to understand, sometimes even for clever statisticians. Add elfandsafety ,plus faceless unaccountable bureaucrats, and for good measure throw in the concept of cost/benefit to the mix, and it all becomes too much for the renowned mathematical incapacity of us Brits.
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HJ
I know about the Putney gas explosion and all that, many of my colleagues were on that, but you have to find out where the gas engineers had to locate the actual leak and dig down to make a repair and if an explosion had occurred, debris would have been blown all over the entry slip at J13 and into the main carriageway. This could have caused serious injury or worse a pile up that would have probably closed the motorway anyway.
I know bearing in mind another thread, you won't accept any reason for closing a road, but this is the possible reason why it was for a short time.
As I said, shuting major roads needs a concerted effort by many authorities to ease congestion created by effective traffic management. In cases like this, there is no evidence this is put into practice.
(My edit was a spelling correction to replace 'except' with 'accept'.)
Edited by Honestjohn on 27/08/2009 at 13:33
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Look the Runnymede hotel up on Google Earth and you can see how close it is to the M25.>>
It is close, yes, but couldn't the anti-clockwise carriageway have been kept open even if the clockwise was shut down?
I don't understand the difficulty in shutting off a gas main. How can engineers dig down and repair if the gas isn't or can't be turned off?
If you shut the M25 there is no way you can "ease congestion". Traffic that should be on the motorway pours onto local roads and causes gridlock.
I'm trying to think of a polite way of putting this, but I get an impression of self-righteousness in the "this is the way we handle it" approach to road closure and, in effect, the rest of you just have to put up with it.
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