“I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been doing this for quite a while,” said Seth Smallwood, one of the workers on the road construction project in Sabraton, when asked about a co-worker he witnessed get hit by a rogue driver on Monday.
The hit-and-run incident, which the Dominion Post reported Wednesday, occurred on the first day of the construction project, and the victim was not seriously injured, Smallwood spoke to The Dominion Post Thursday, saying driver impatience and aggressiveness in the area is getting worse, particularly with this project.
“The traffic is so bad,” he said. “It’s – it’s unreal” – adding that he was almost hit by another driver on Wednesday near the Interstate-68 bridge.
“I understand – I do get it,” he said. “Before I did this for a living – I couldn’t stand to sit in traffic. It’s horrible. Nobody wants to do that. I get that.
“But it’s not like today was the first day – we have been there now for multiple days – people know we are there,” he said. “There are other ways to go. Why do you want to sit in that traffic and then complain about it?”
Smallwood said when drivers get upset and don’t listen to their instructions it only makes the backups worse and will cause everyone to have to wait longer.
“We’re not out there to hold you all up and make you miserable,” he said. “Like, we don’t want to stand there and get cussed at. We’re not making you wait – it’s this giant equipment that’s in the road that you can’t drive through.
“We are there to keep the people in the vehicles safe – if no one is there to direct traffic there would be literally hundreds of crashes, because no one will let no one else out. It’s bumper-to-bumper, and they do way over speed limit.”
The Department of Highways did not respond to questions about how long the project is scheduled to last, but Smallwood said the construction will continue – likely for another week or two – as crews will be milling and then paving W.Va. 7 to the Preston County line.
However, delays should not be quite as long once they finish the four-lane section of the road and move into the two-lane section heading to Preston County.
“It won’t be as bad once we don’t have four lanes of traffic trying to merge into one,” Smallwood said.
At the time of this article, the Morgantown Police Department had not yet made an arrest on the driver who allegedly hit the worker on Monday, but had made an identification and was working on obtaining arrest warrants.
