the more we asked questions the more things didn t measure up if it was something so innocuous. for months the port authority refused to release details on the traffic study or explain how it came about. the initial clue is that there was no notice to local officials, including police, emergency vehicles and that was a deviation from what you would see in a standard traffic study that affects the world s busiest bridge. your paper posted a story tonight detailing effects of the traffic jam on emergency responders based on a letter that was sent from the head of the emergency medical response to the mayor of fort lee about lengthened response times and people who had some serious medical consequences at the time. i m not asking for your sources, but how did you get that story? how have you been able to get documents throughout this story that haven t been otherwise
as you know, the official line in the beginning was that this was a traffic study, but the more we asked questions the more things didn t measure up if it was something so innocuous. for months the port authority refused to release details on the traffic study or explain how it came about. the initial clue is that there was no notice to local officials, including police, emergency vehicles and that was a deviation from what you would see in a standard traffic study that affects the world s busiest bridge. your paper posted a story tonight detailing effects of the traffic jam on emergency responders based on a letter
the local traffic column wrote up a really weird and unusually terrible week from trying to drive from new jersey into new york this was the photo they ran to accompany their article. can you see there s a guy standing in the middle of the traffic, he s not like a cop or something, he s in khakis and a little blue shirt. he got out of his car to try to figure out what it was that had completely stopped traffic getting on to the nation s most heavily trafficked bridge from the new jersey town of ft. lee. that column about the traffic jam on the bridge in fort lee, ran on friday. it had been like that for days. it stopped the traffic on to the bridge, the traffic jam gridlocked all the surface streets in the town of fort lee, hundreds of cars backed up on to the streets for hours during rush hour, coming and going, it was epic, it lasted for days. it turns out that traffic jam was created on push, which they knew right from the start. the port authority, which runs the bridge cut the n
the first day of the man made politically motivated traffic disaster that was ordered by governor christie s office, the first day was monday september 9th. on tuesday september 10th, the emergency medical services coordinator for fort lee wrote to the mayor to explain what this traffic disaster meant for first responders in fort lee, quoting from the report tonight, on december 9th, the first day of the traffic paralysis, ems crews took 7 to 9 minutes to arrive at the scene of an accident where four people were injured. when the response time should have been less than four minutes. it also took responders 7 minutes to reach an unconscious 91-year-old woman who died of cardiac arrest. he did not say her duff was caused by delays. paramedics were delayed in responding to the woman s case due to the heavy traffic in fort lee. the paramedics had to meet the ambulance on route to the hospital instead of on the scene
tollbooths from 3 to 1 on the big span. the bergen record asked, why would the port authority purposely quadruple commuting times for some of the people who live closest to one of the nation s busiest bridges. good question, bergen record traffic columnist. good question. and at this point on the friday of the week that this traffic jam happened, at this points this still was a local story about a traffic jam, but the point at which it stopped being a local story about a traffic jam, and started being a story about why chris christie is probably never going to be president of the united states