LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles, a city renowned for its traffic, is about to face a jam of biblical proportions.

"Carmageddon" is the name Los Angeles residents are giving the likely epic traffic tie-up that will result when a 16-km stretch of the 405 Freeway is closed for construction from Friday night to Monday morning between two of the nation's busiest interchanges.

The unprecedented 53-hour shutdown, expected to delay motorists for hours on alternate routes with ripple effects on about a dozen other major highways, will allow crews to demolish a bridge as part of a $1 billion freeway-widening project.

In a sign that few motorists in America's second-largest city take a breezy attitude toward the closure, Los Angeles plans to open its emergency operations center over the weekend.

Officials have also recruited celebrities to warn motorists of the impending gridlock. The main message: Stay away! That message has inspired a number of leisure destinations outside Los Angeles to offer special "Escape Carmageddon" discount packages, from a Mammoth Mountain hotel in the Eastern Sierras to a hotel-casino in Las Vegas.

But most people who live and work in and around the gridlock zone have no choice but to hunker down for the weekend.

The UCLA Medical Center has secured 600 dorms and apartments as temporary quarters for hospital staff as part of an emergency plan to prevent doctors and nurses from getting stuck in traffic.

"We see this as being a disaster - only it's a planned disaster," said Posie Carpenter, the medical center's chief administrative officer.

The Getty Center, a popular art museum nestled in the hills above the 405 Freeway, has said it will be closed to visitors this weekend because of the construction project.

Booking a hotel

Lisa McGuinness is going to stay in a hotel for three nights near the deli she owns, rather than risk stewing in traffic for hours.

"The freeway stresses me out every day," McGuinness said. "With this, I'm just thinking we just have to stay out of it. I just can't even imagine what the streets are going to be like."

In an "Over-the-405" promotion launched on Wednesday by JetBlue Airways, the discount airline offered special nonstop flights between Long Beach and Burbank for Saturday priced at just $4 each way, taxes and fees included.

The 600 seats available on the four flights - two each going in either direction - sold out within three hours, the airline said.

Charter helicopter companies are selling air "taxi" service to Los Angeles International Airport for well-heeled travelers fearful of missing pre-booked airline flights to more distant destinations.

Adventure Helicopter Tours is offering 45-minute flights over the area, complete with champagne, for $400 per couple.

The stretch of the 405 Freeway that will be closed, known locally as the Sepulveda Pass, is traversed by about 500,000 vehicles on a typical summer weekend, said Marc Littman, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), an agency handling the project.

The canyon pass is a traffic choke point even without a construction project, as it serves as a north-south gateway from the city's San Fernando Valley to several beaches and the more temperate westside.

The 405, a US interstate route that runs from Irvine, California, north to the Mission Hills district of Los Angeles, is perhaps best known elsewhere for the widely televised low-speed police chase of O.J. Simpson, then suspected in the murder of his ex-wife, in June 1994.

Reuters

(China Daily 07/16/2011 page6)