Among the thousands of inconvenienced motorists were Dolores and Dennis Darden of Norristown. They had fled the North Carolina coastal town of New Bern in the mass evacuation in anticipation of Hurricane Bonnie. Now they found themselves bogged down close to home.
``It's been a disappointing week, and this is just the icing on the cake,'' Dolores Darden said in Marcus Hook, where she and her husband had pulled off to get gas.
The snarl was caused by a dip in a 6-by-12-foot section of the center lane of the just-repaired roadway. The highway has been undergoing a $2.7 million repaving from the Blue Route south to the state line since Aug. 11. PennDot officials had said that the contractor would perform the work between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. on weekdays but said the emergency nature of the repairs yesterday required immediate attention.
The section of I-95 that runs through Chester has been beleaguered by traffic disruptions for months, the most serious being the May 23 collision between a tanker truck and pickup truck that killed two people and prompted bridge and road repairs that took more than five weeks.
Yesterday's problem site, a deterioration spot, had initially been repaved with asphalt about 4:30 a.m. But when it began getting heavy truck traffic a bit later, the dip developed and the two lanes were closed.
When the contractor tried fixing the road a second time, workers noticed the asphalt continued to shift as they tried to compress it. So they dug even deeper and found water trapped far below, officials said.
``They normally dig out 10 inches, and this water that was trapped down there was several inches below that,'' said PennDot supervisor Scott Pearson.
To make the repair, Pearson said, workers had to dig down two feet, then lay eight inches of stone ballast, a sub-base layer and then the top base layer.
``It was a freak thing,'' Pearson said.
Nancy Seff got a double-dose of traffic problems as she transported her daughter from their Owings Mills, Md., home to Muhlenberg College in Allentown. At 5:30 a.m. she was caught in the I-95 traffic jam, she said, then on her afternoon return she found herself stuck in traffic on the Pennsylvania Turnpike's Northeast Extension because of an overturned tractor-trailer in Worcester Township. The truck flipped after blowing out a tire and hitting an embankment about 1 p.m.
Both southbound lanes were closed for 30 minutes and the driver, Norman Jackson Jr., 30, of Philadelphia, was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was listed in good condition.
``I can't wait to get to sleep,'' Seff said.
