By Steve Gorman and Daniel Trotta
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Los Angeles commuters appeared to largely heed warnings to limit their driving on Monday after a weekend fire heavily damaged an elevated stretch of a downtown freeway, forcing an indefinite closure of the structure and setting the stage for an extended traffic nightmare.
Some 300,000 vehicles ply the Santa Monica Freeway daily, with downtown L.A. often congested under normal circumstances, so that detours from the closure were expected to ripple out and compound heavy traffic across the metropolitan area.
Two days after the fire, transportation officials said they had yet to determine whether the stricken portion of the freeway can be repaired or will need to be demolished and rebuilt.
The flames, which charred support columns and the freeway deck, spread through at least two storage yards filled with stacks of wood pallets and containers beneath the overpass, the Los Angeles Fire Department said.
It took 164 firefighters from 26 fire companies several hours early Saturday to put out the blaze, fire officials said.
No connection was immediately found between the fire and a nearby homeless encampment, Mayor Karen Bass said, adding that 16 people found there had since been placed into housing.
No injuries were reported. The cause of the blaze remained under investigation.
Despite traffic concerns, Laura Rubio-Cornejo, general manager of the city Transportation Department, said many motorists seemed to be minding advisories urging them away from downtown streets and to use public transit or work from home when possible.
“The congestion was a little better than normal,” Rubio-Cornejo said.
Even so, roads in and around downtown were jam-packed, according to local media, and even minor traffic accidents could quickly be amplified into gridlock.
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday proclaimed a state of emergency in Los Angeles County in order to expedite repairs to the freeway. While touring the damage, the governor vowed to get the highway reopened as quickly as possible.
Core samples of concrete and steel rebar were being examined to determine the strength of fire-damaged structures, said Tony Tavares, director of the California Department of Transportation.
“Once we analyze the samples, we will get a clearer idea of our repair strategy,” he said. “Caltran is working 24/7, literally, to determine the engineering impact to this vital structure on Los Angeles.”
Meanwhile, crews were shoring up the overpass to ensure it was safe to work beneath it, and contractors were ready to start pouring concrete for new pillars if needed, Tavares said.
The damaged section of freeway, also known as the east-west Interstate 10 – or “the 10” in local parlance – was closed in both directions at a point between two other freeways vital to getting around Los Angeles, where traveling by car is the norm.
The closure, one of the area’s most consequential transportation disruptions since the January 1994 Northridge earthquake flattened two parts of the same freeway, was likely to last several days or longer, Bass said.
Following the Northridge quake, the freeway was reopened in about three months, 74 days sooner than planned, after the contractor was offered a $200,000 bonus for every day the work was finished ahead of schedule, the Los Angeles Times reported.
It remained to be seen whether the latest shutdown would impact the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Matt Schrap, head of the Harbor Trucking Association representing drivers who haul goods to and from the nation’s busiest container shipping complex.
“The disruption and spillover to other freeways may have a negative impact as traffic finds other outlets. Time will tell how widespread the impact,” he said.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta and Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Stephen Coates)
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