Many residents of Paradise, California, were trapped by gridlock as the Camp Fire ravaged their town, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.
As people tried to flee the fire, gridlock was everywhere. The town has just one four-lane road, Skyway, which handles about 1,200 cars an hour during rush hour.
“Now it was being asked to empty a city of nearly 27,000,” the news outlet reported. “The cars backed up into the feeder streets, and into the secondary roads that fed those.”
As traffic came to a standstill, people got out of their cars and ran in an attempt to outrace the fast-moving fire. Abandoned cars blocked the roadways as other drivers and emergency crews tried to get through, according to the report. Some fire trucks attempted to plow the abandoned cars out of the way. – READ MORE