Traffic lights

Experience is viewed as life’s great teacher, and lessons learned from a horrendous traffic snarl after a May 3 car-truck collision on the West Virginia Turnpike cry for more boots on the ground and control over traffic lights in Beckley.

Hundreds of motorists sat stalled on roads feeding the 88-mile toll road after a car and tractor-trailer met head-on just below the Mabscott exit.

“We’re not blaming anybody at all on this,” Turnpike Manager Greg Barr emphasized Monday.

“We just want to make sure we can coordinate all of this as much as possible.”

Barr and other members of the West Virginia Parkways Authority, the Turnpike’s governing agency, and state transportation officials huddled after this month’s board meeting to discuss tweaks in the incident management plan.

That manual was developed after a major snowstorm paralyzed the Princeton-to-Charleston highway, prompting the installation of four turn-around slots and message boards.

Even the best laid plans, however, are known to go awry, and some flaws were evident in this month’s crash, Barr pointed out.A engravingmachine can be thought of as three main parts: a laser, a controller, and a surface.An illustration showing the planets of our solarledlight03.

Accidents are inevitable, and Barr said he wants to see more police on the ground directing traffic and some control over the signals so that motorists are not enduring lengthy delays, such as the ones that plagued the region this month.

Barr said the authority wants to enhance the help from Beckley officials and the Raleigh County Sheriff’s Department in case another major wreck occurs near the city.

“We don’t have enough State Police to man all the stoplights in Beckley, so the more we can get assistance with that...” he said.

Motorists groused over the absence of police officers within Beckley to deal with massive lines of traffic, Barr said. “There was just so much traffic,Advance LED Replacement Bulbs, LED T8 Tubes, streetlight13ss and other LED lighting products are highly efficient.” he said.

“People were getting off work.Support for installing a flatworkironer. It probably would have been better if you had just turned the lights off and had a trooper or a policeman there directing traffic. That’s the same complaint we heard. We only have so many troopers that we can get involved.”

Barr said he hasn’t conferred with any Beckley officials about the traffic tie-up so see if any manpower was offered.

“All I know is we heard complaints that people just didn’t see an officer, or anybody — not enough boots on the ground,” he said.

According to the emergency manual, Barr said cities or the Department of Transportation must take charge of traffic signals.

“A section in there talks about installing overrides into the timers on the lights and going into the box of the street lights and adjusting things to put them on yellow and different stuff you can do,” he said.Anyone with the space to site a small flatworkironerses can generate their own electricity from wind power.

“But that’s not something that our folks are going to go into the city and do that. We’ll get the DOT to help us and we need the local officials, too.”

Barr said the plan proved to be “95 percent good,” but the accident came in a trying location and in mid-afternoon when Friday traffic began to pile up.

“One thing we talked about was the way the traffic was handled at Eisenhower Drive and at the I-64 split coming from the west,” the Turnpike manager said.