Highway shutdowns up to local fire chief

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From the Times Herald-Record

Highway shutdowns up to local fire chief

Times Herald-Record

July 06, 2007

Town of Newburgh — It's the type of accident scenario that keeps fire chiefs up at night: Friday afternoon, New York State Thruway, summer weekend.

On June 29, just as northbound Thruway traffic was picking up through the Hudson Valley, a collision put the ball in John Doogan's court.

Doogan is the chief of the Cronomer Valley all-volunteer fire department and responsible for the stretch of Thruway where the crash happened.

His choice? Leave the Thruway lanes open while his crews worked at the scene.

Or shut it down and turn the major artery linking New York City and Upstate into a 60-mile-long, fuming, overheating parking lot on a Friday evening — as thousands of drivers head to the Catskills and Lake George.

As the summer travel season gets into high gear, few New Yorkers understand that it's volunteer, part-time fire chiefs like Doogan, and not the state police or Thruway Authority, who decide to shut down major thoroughfares like the Thruway, Interstate 84 and Route 17 following accidents.

And because New York is a patchwork of volunteer fire and rescue companies, dozens of volunteer fire officers share that responsibility.

In Orange County alone, 12 different fire departments have jurisdiction over pieces of the 45-mile stretch of Thruway here. Many more of Orange County's 53 fire departments cover parts of I-84.

"Obviously, everybody's got safety as the first concern," said Pat Welsh, chief of the Tuxedo Fire District. "But the decision (to shut down those roads) can be tough. You're trying to appease the state police, the Thruway guys, and everybody else."

Welsh had to make that decision back in March, when two tractor-trailers collided and caught fire along the section of Thruway in Tuxedo. He shut down all northbound lanes for several hours that day, backing up drivers for more than 12 hours in a traffic jam of historic proportions. Both truckers were killed.

"It was tough. There is a lot of anger, a lot of people screaming at you," said Welsh, whose day job is as a local police sergeant. "But there's not a lot we could do."

State police said that the local chiefs' decisions are usually reached after consultation with troopers.

"It's always a incident-by-incident decision," said Sgt. Joseph Clancy, of State Police Troop T, the unit that patrols the Thruway. "For the most part, we have a good relationship with all the chiefs. That's not to say we haven't had discussions afterwards where this could have been better, or that could have gone smoother."

The June 29 accident, just north of Exit 17 in Newburgh, could have been worse: injuries were minor and rescue personnel were able to open one lane within an hour.

Still, even the short closure caused back-ups all the way back to the Harriman tolls, nearly 20 miles away.