Category: Highway 92

Both lanes on Hwy 92 are open now–but it took Burt 1 hour and ten minutes of waiting on the road–due to a big rig fire which closed down the highway.

Burt says the fire occurred on the west side of 92 in east-bound lanes. “The truck was completely burned, the cab was burned. How could that have happened?”

He saw one firetruck and numerous CHP (California Highway Patrol) vehicles at the scene of the fire. The remains of the truck have been pulled to the side of the road (we haven’t heard what happened to the driver…we hope he’s okay).

“The traffic was just horrible,” says Burt who sat in his car behind two garbage trucks. “The trucks made it impossible for me to see what was going on.”

Now that both sides of Highway 92 are open again, Burt says he sees hundreds of cars backed-up waiting to head west to Half Moon Bay.

A “fully engulfed” big rig fire closed down Highway 92 in both directions
beginning at 10:11am, according to the Highway Patrol, according to Coastsider.com

…Coastsider.com reports that Caltrans officials at a press conference yesterday announced that Devil’s Slide will reopen on August 4th.

Praise the Lord!

Our gratitude is overwhelming…Thank you to the engineers and working guys at the Slide who beat the schedual, thank you to all the officials for whatever role they played.

Hey CalTrans, one more thing….the poor slugs that sit on Hwy 92– two-three hours per day– may not even get this good news…How about spreading the word on all the printed signs and new electronic boards that give the number of minutes to and from Hwy 280 & Hwy 1….

…And one last thought: If on August 4 there is a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Slide’s reopening– in addition to the smiling bureaucrats and politicians– PLEASE make sure a couple of commuters are represented at the ceremony, too.

(Photo: Commuters raring to go when the Slide reopens).

P.S. Re-opening of the Slide is a headline story in the San Mateo Times

Commuters heading home to Half Moon Bay on Monday afternoon, the 10th of July, were stopped in their tracks near Half Moon Bay Nursery. Burt and I were two of those commuters, some 300 yards away from what–at a distance– looked like debris on the road. I wasn’t able to see what was in the road nor were any of the other drivers in front of me.

All of us were baffled. If it was an accident, where were the cars?

As we waited emergency vehicles arrived, including two ambulances. We waited, straining to see.

All we could see was something lying on the road. Something dark. Radio news didn’t know yet. I called 511* for traffic info but the man on the recording said there was a “delay between Skyline and Skyline” on Highway 92, but cars were moving at 35-40 mph. No way! And, where’s Skyline & Skyline?

I decided to find out the old-fashioned way: I called Half Moon Bay Nursery, and asked Brad, who answered, if he knew what had happened.

“Two motorcycles were struck by a vehicle,” he told me.

“Thank you, Brad.”

(Meanwhile two ambulances left the scene, heading east.)

I called KCBS and the story was aired seconds later. “Avoid 92,” the traffic reporter said “92 is a parking lot…”

We were near the front of the line and passed the endless line of cars, standing still, stretching from the scene of the horrible accident west to Highway 1–It’ll take at least a couple of hours to clear this up, I thought.

I didn’t want to imagine how far the line stretched, all those cars at a standstill, in the opposite direciton–and, there are very very few places to turn around on Highway 92.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r4-gjwVdbQ]