Hervey Bay Gossip

Your scribe and his better half had to take a trip to Brisbane and back yesterday - about 600 kms in 9 hours. There was quite a lot of traffic on the road but no one was acting the fool so we had a rather safe trip … once we got out of the Bay.

It’s sad to say that the most hazardous part of the trip was right here in Hervey Bay and it wasn’t any motorist who caused the problem but two traffic control people down on the Esplanade at Urangan.

We were following a large mobile crane down Elizabeth Street and onto the Esplanade - no problems there, the crane driver obviously had his wits about him and was driving with all due caution and care. He arrived at the building site where he was to work and needed to reverse onto the site.

Again there was no problem - we were the first car behind him and we gave him plenty of room and we waited for him. There was no oncoming traffic and so he was prepared to reverse onto the site and was in the process of doing so when suddenly two traffic controllers came running from the site to take control of the situation.

And from there things just got farcical. Was the crane to go? No … we were signalled on … then the traffic coming the other way got the go ahead before we had a chance to move … then everybody had to stop while the traffic controllers got their act together. And then the whole silly scene started all over again.

Fortunately one of the site workers who had a few more brain cells than the traffic controllers marched onto the road and stopped the crane, stopped the traffic and stopped the controllers and then injected some common sense into the situation.

Sometimes I seriously wonder about some of those traffic controllers - in that situation they were about as much use as a hip pocket in singlet.

Who knows how quickly the situation might have been resolved and how few cars might have been delayed if they hadn’t been there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 7:51 am and is filed under Property Development, Roads, General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.