Road washed away by heavy downpour leaves travellers stranded on highway

Thousands of travelers on the busy Port Harcourt-Warri axis of the East-West highway were left stranded for several hours on Monday when a section of the road gave way around Patani, Delta State.

It was gathered that the section ‎of the road was washed away by heavy downpour on Sunday night.

Angry motorists and their passengers blamed their fates on perceived inefficiency of the contractor handling the protracted road project and the Federal Government.

Sources from the scene told our reporter that traffic‎ started building up as early as 5am when the first sets of the vehicles reached the failed portion.

Those desperate to get to their destinations were forced to walk several miles through the failed section of the road and hundreds of stuck vehicles to get other vehicles to take them to their destinations.

Mr. Eghosa Osayande, a staff of Julius Berger Nigeria, told our reporter that he spent several hours there on his way from Port Harcourt to Warri.

“I arrived there at 7:24am I had to leave the Agofure (commercial) bus at 9:30am to where I could get a vehicle to ughelli‎,” he said in a telephone conversation.

Eghosa later got to Warri at about 1pm, over seven hours after he left Port Harcourt.

Others, particularly those who drove their own cars were not so lucky as most of them were still at the scene at the time of this report on Monday evening.

The perplexed ‎JBN staff advised those planning to travel through the road on Monday to reschedule their trips in order to avoid spending the night on the road.

The Nation