Louisiana Voice

Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s oh-so-easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, second-guessing decisions and non-decisions.

But. It just seems that someone in charge should have known that conditions on I-55 were not conducive to safe travel Monday morning. Those conditions included:

• Heavy fog, described by officials as a Super Fog, and
• Smoke from area fires.

In my 23 years of teaching defensive driving to traffic offenders, one of the things I stressed was the dangers inherent in driving in areas where smoke blanked the roadway.

Fog is bad enough as a visibility inhibitor, but dense smoke cuts visibility to zero. The combination of fog and smoke creates a lethal blanket and should have prompted the closure of I-55, the interstate highway that begins in LaPlace in St. John the Baptist Parish and runs north through Hammond and on to Jackson, Mississippi and points further north.

The area in question here is an elevated 20-mile portion of interstate that runs over swampy waters of Lake Maurepas.

Monday morning, 168 cars and trucks were involved in a massive wreck that claimed eight lives, injured 63 more and left twisted, burned out, unrecognizable cars clogging the interstate which remains closed as this is being written. When viewing the carnage, it seems a miracle that more weren’t killed.

The Cars have been cleared out, but the cleanup of debris is ongoing and then the Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) will have to inspect the roadway way to be sure its integrity isn’t compromised by the hundreds collisions and dozens of fires.

Who should’ve been responsible for closing the highway? It’s apparently DOTD’s job to determine when conditions warrant closure of the highways of the state. The Bonnet Carre Spillway and Lake Pontchartrain Causeway were closed for a time Monday morning. Who made the decision to close those elevated highways? Why not I-55?

DOTD maintains that it is just not feasible to make such determinations given the frequency of foggy conditions and the number of elevated roadways and bridges in the state.

But the National Weather Service had warned of heavy fog on Sunday afternoon, according a story in today’s Baton Rouge Advocate.

The spate of lawsuits that is certain to follow in the next few days, weeks and months will most likely name both DOTD and LSP as defendants. Lawyers generally throw everything against the wall to see what will stick. No matter which one is ultimately held responsible, the state is likely to be shelling out a lot of money in judgments and settlements – but not before the defense attorneys get a chance to run up their tabs filing the usual denials, objections and interrogatories.

The arguments in defense of the state will likely be that common sense should have dictated that one should not have ventured onto the roadway in such treacherous conditions and that the state did not have sufficient notice in which to act. It will be an opportunity for attorneys from both sides to get well on hourly fees, settlements and judgments before this mess is concluded.

And it will be you, the taxpayer, who ultimately will foot the bill for somebody’s indecision.

And lest someone take it upon themselves to accuse me of encouraging litigation against the state, I am certain that Morris Bart, Gordon McKernan, Spencer Callahan, Dudley DeBosier, et al, are fully capable of functioning without my assistance.

You can pretty much bet that lawyers all over Southeast Louisiana have already begun diving into the law books and state regulations pertaining to hazardous driving conditions.

It didn’t help when a state official said DOTD would be considering protocols that could be implemented to address foggy conditions. That raises the immediate question of why hasn’t that already been done in a state as prone to hazardous foggy conditions as Louisiana?