Tunnel closed

Press, 7 March 1988, Page 1

Tunnel closed

The "Birdman Challenge” on Lyttelton Harbour yesterday ranked with Royalty as one of the very few attractions popular enough to overload the Lyttelton road tunnel, j So many cars were belching exhaust fumes as they crawled bumper to bumper through the tunnel to i reach the event that the ventilation fans; were, overloaded and the tunnel had to be closed. ■ | I- ■ ■ * : 1 A tunnel control spokesman said that the only other time he could remember that, happening was during a visit to Lyttelton by the Royal Yacht Britannia “many years ago.”] “It is very rare,” he said. The tunnel was closed yesterday to allow the fumes to clear, from 11.55 a.m. to 12.09 p.m. Traffic [was backed up on all routes into Lyttelton well before then, however. A typical experience would have been that of the man who turned oh to Dyers Road from Linwood Avenue about 10.40 a.m. to find himself at the end of a queue stretching across the Ferry Road intersection towards the tunnel.) By 11 a.m., he had reached the Heathcote turnoff, having driven the 2.5 km about walking pace. At that point, [he joined the steady trickle of drivers cutting their losses and turning for home.

The event, organised by radio station C.93FM, started at 10.30 a.m. and finished about 1.30 p.m. By midday, its announcers were advising the public not to attempt to drive to Lyttelton. Senior-Sergeant Syd Burt, of the Ministry of Transport, said that traffic was extremely heavy on all routes, even the Summit Road .carrying a lot.of traffic. Senior-Sergeant Burt said that the fine weather ! probably brought a larger crowd than the organisers had expected. It was a larger ■ crowd than attended the last birdman rally, held at Lyttelton ini 1979. People crowded every vantage point to watch the event, won by Gary Wakefield, of Christchurch, with a flight of 9.5 metres. There was one near tragedy when the counterweights for the old inter-island ferry roll-on ramp fell under the weight of spectators. A young boy underneath suffered minor injuries when the weights hit him on the head and arm, said a St John ambulance spokesman. I The boy could have lost an arm had the weights fallen much further, he said. ' Only one person had. to be taken to hospital, a spectator ).’ith a suspected sprained ankle, uffered when he fell from a rane. , „ Picture, result page 6