Last week during and after the snow/ice storm, we had a couple hundred motorists stranded for up to 20 hours on I-78 in eastern Pennsylvania. Here is one newspaper article about the event.
So, I’m thinking, if I were stranded on an interstate, and sat there for 2-3 hours as the sun set, the temperature plummeted, and my fuel level dropped, I might wish that I could just remove the concrete barrier between the Eastbound and Westbound lanes and just do a U-turn.
Could a group of desperate stranded motorists pull that off? Are the barriers bolted together or just tongue-in-groove? The smaller ones look to be about 4 feet tall - could you lift them up and out if you had enough muscle?
At 600 lbs per linear foot, that means with a person on each side, at about one person per two feet, each of the motorists have to lift six hundred pounds, in the snow, standing on icy footing. (how far do you want to carry this thing?)
Who said anything about lifting the whole thing? If you had a few men with crowbars, you could just lever a couple sideways until you had an opening you could drive through. Unless they are firmly anchored, which they may or may not be, they can be manhandled into place. Doesn’t anybody remember Volcano?
Slip-formed barriers are not amenable to any changes other than by explosives or serious hammers. (Was there enough snow after the feezing rain to actually build two ramps long enough to allow passage over the Jerseys?)
Unit-installed barriers are only slightly better: they are generally joined by a 3/4 inch to 1 1/4 inch bolt passed through U-shackles set in grooves in each end. Someone carrying a very large wrench might be able to unfasten the bolts and pry them up. (Someone with a cutting torch could cut either the bolt or the shackle.)
Then, if there was a moderately large front-loader on one of the stuck trucks, it could half lift, half drag the barrier out of the way. No single pickup is going to move a barrier, although three or more might (if they could get close enough to all pull or push–provided they could get traction on the snow and ice).
A sufficiently large number of humans could swing one around (they are smaller than the pyramid stones), but you’d need a large number of steel pry bars or enough axes to find enough saplings or tree limbs along the road to create wooden levers.
I guess the effort would keep a group warm until they were told to put it back in place by the road crew plowing them out.
The snow that fell locally was 6 inches of snow, followed by 6 inches of sleet, followed by some freezing rain that just solidified it all together. Even the Pennsylvania plows couldn’t clean up after it - they had to use road graters. If you could form that into a ramp, you’d probably have to use a winch to drag the car over it.
I had read about the u-shackles, which is why I figured you’d have to lift the barrier out of the channels instead of just pushing them aside. But I hadn’t known about the bolt. That would certainly get in the way of things…
