You Dumped WHAT on my Car?

Yesterday I went to Ocean Springs and Gulfport (the sites of two of our campuses) to meet with faculty about proposals they are or will be working on. I also had lunch with the program director of my evaluation contract. Ordinarily that wouldn't be interesting enough to put into a blog, but I experienced news-making traffic. Now, I know this is Biloxi, but I WAS in the middle of it, and it was news-making traffic.

I left Ocean Springs and went up to the Interestate because the Biloxi Bay bridge is gone from Hurricane Katrina and probably won't be opened until at least 2 years. So, what was once a 2 mile drive across the bay is now a 25 mile drive, in traffic. So, I get on the interstate and am cruising at decent speed, when I come up over a hill and realize that traffic is stopped. I sat and sat and sat. Then realized we weren't moving and probably wouldn't for a while. I called my lunch appiontment and told her I'd be a while. It took almost an hour of creeping and crawling to move about 3 miles.

As I'm sitting in traffice more and more police cars are driving along the side to get to the accident. I thought "maybe they'll be directing traffic and moving us along soon. " I had the thought that maybe someone was trying to jump off the bridge ahead...Then I saw the "hazmat" truck and got worried--chemical or oil spill? Then, if you'll believe it, when I finally get to the scene, there is dirt, or what looks like it, all over the place. I followed the trail with my eyes and saw that a dump truck was indeed pulled over on the side of the highway, apparently having lost his load. I figured it must have caused an accident from all of the glass and car parts still on the freeway but there weren't any full cars there.

When I get to the Gulfport campus, I looked on line to see if there was a traffic advicement at least--there were two. The first said that there was a 2-car accident on the Biloxi River Bridge that would have traffic backed up until noon. The second said that there was a report of...well, just read it for yourself...

So, I sat in traffic for over an hour yesterday because of a sewage spill (that's what I make of the miscommunication in the paper...there couldn't have been a sewage "backup" on the Biloxi River Bridge because it's a pretty big bridge over a pretty big river that has boat traffic...). And now my lower back is in a muscle spasm from that horrible driving experience...I'm just glad I wasn't the person who got the "surprise" load dumped on me. How horrible!