Last week's N11 cock-up

Last Wednesday’s major cock-up on the N11 remains a major topic of debate.

The main culprits and various Government Ministers have all found the same hymn sheet to sing off. We are told that it was a major systems failure whereby Dublin City Council failed to notify all the other interested parties about the scale of the disruption planned and, consequently, remedial measures e.g. a contra flow system, were not put in place.

However, the most worrying systems failure on that day was the inability to alleviate matters once traffic had begun to back-up severely from early afternoon. I passed these particular roadworks at about 2.30pm, having been delayed by about 30 minutes. Returning from Wicklow at about 7.30pm, the traffic-jam had worsened to almost unimaginable proportions. In that 5-hour period, no effective remedial action had been taken.

A situation causing the closure of the hard shoulder and one lane of the road could just as easily have arisen through unplanned circumstances - a multiple vehicle pile-up, a truck shedding its load, a spillage of hazardous chemicals etc.. Indeed, it’s a much more likely scenario and one that would probably occur with far greater frequency that a burst main beside the road. One can easily envisage all the lanes on one side of the carriageway being closed by fire brigade, ambulance and garda vehicles in such a situation.

Would we - will we- be faced with similar traffic chaos when such an accident occurs? There was no evidence of any effective plan or capability to recover the situation last Wednesday.

Developing such a plan and rehearsing its effective implementation must become a top priority for Gardai and local authorities.

Footnote: Published as a letter in the Irish Independent