It took me over an hour to get to work this morning where it usually takes me 20-25 minutes. The problem was that we had a big storm here in Charlotte last night and some power lines broke. First, let me say that when you have a storm like we had here last night, you expect some power to be out and for it to take a few hours for the power company to get everything back up and running. What you DON’T expect, is for the entire south side of the city to dissolve into utter chaos. The entire outer loop of 485 was closed at one point with no police presence on 485 at all. All traffic was being diverted by a truck with a flashing arrow down the closest exit ramp. At the bottom of the ramp I saw my first officer of the day. She was carrying on a pleasant conversation with a pedestrian who was standing in the median with her and doing everything in her power to ignore the confused and frustrated drivers poking their bumpers nervously into the intersection. If she could have brought herself to wave one of her arms in a slightly encouraging way, I think it would have done wonders for the backup reaching several miles up 485 at this point. Finally, I made my way through and back on to 485 on the other side of whatever it was that caused them to close the bridge (I’m sure it was all for my benefit.) and had wide open road in front of me once again... for about 10 seconds. The next exit was backed up for about 300 yards and not moving. From that point it usually takes me about 5 minutes to get to work. This time it was 20. Once again, no officers directing traffic in all but one intersection and everybody was already pissed from spending 45 minutes of their morning so far in their car, stopped on the highway. It’s just such a disappointment to pour all this money into the state of NC and watch it spent frivolously on crap instead of the basic functions of government.
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