By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief
With another spate of cars reportedly scarred by a damaged safety wall at the Chautauqua/Pacific Coast Highway intersection, Mike Bonin, city councilmember for District 11, is taking up the matter with the wall designers at the state transportation agency Caltrans.
The metal barrier was apparently damaged again by a heavy vehicle, curled into a foot-long jagged shard that rips open cars on the passenger side after they have turned left from Chautauqua onto PCH.
Caltrans is very fast at repairing the metal barrier, maybe because its engineers are getting a lot of practice—it has been twisted into a shard at least three times in the last three months.
But a rising chorus of horrified drivers say that is not enough—the metal barrier at the end of the concrete “sleeve,” which protects drivers from oncoming traffic must be replaced by something less vulnerable to damage and less likely to cause vehicular destruction.
Outsider experts have recommended a hard-plastic wall which, if struck, disintegrates rather than adds to driver woes.
The latest cascade of calamities began on Thursday, June 1, when a newly ripped shard gouged car of the Palisadian doctor. It was “gouged from front to back on the passenger side” by this projection. The doctor appealed to fellow victims on social media to get organized.
Drivers from Rustic Canyon, El Medio Bluffs, The Huntington and Via Mesa all joined in on Nextdoor with similar accounts of being blindsided by what is supposed to be a safety wall.
The Palisadian-Post has been contacted by an attorney who lent “one of his BMWs” to his parents visiting from Europe who were “distraught” when the shard tore up their car.
With a bill in the many thousands of dollars, the attorney, who requested temporary anonymity, is considering a class action lawsuit against Caltrans, the agency responsible for the wall.
The alternative is the agency’s own claims process for damages under $10,000, which may not cover all the damages to the German automobile.
Caltrans has said they are “looking into” the design of the wall, but that is not enough for Bonin.
A spokesman for the councilor said this is the agency’s responsibility, and that his office is dealing directly with Caltrans to urge them to come up with fresh thinking about the old problem.
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