Description

On 10/19/17 at 2:15, I was making a left turn on to Orange St. from Elm, and an emergency was taking place. On the left hand side of Orange (going West) was a fire engine, unmanned. On the side of Orange heading East, an emergency van was offloading a gurney in front of Christy's. One car was ahead of me as traffic stopped. There appeared to be room between the fire engine and the van for traffic to pass.

As three people leisurely took their time with the gurney, the car ahead of me started to back up. This struck me a strange, no direction was given to the car ahead of me to do so, plus it is highly foolish to back into a high-speed one way street. I immediately stopped my car and blew the horn, asking for guidance and protection (again, there were at least three people there, plus a huge fire engine (that literally if parked properly could have blocked off all of Orange St. from access!). To this, a nasty female EMT came by the car and said to me "you have to back up, everything ahead is shut down". I said, "someone in your group needs to direct traffic out to Elm and stop traffic so we could safely back out". (She hurried away from us. leaving me to blare the horn and inch out in bright sun into moving traffic and jaywalkers where, one kind soul let me come out).

Common sense management would have had at least one of the three people milling about stopping traffic onto Orange Street so that one emergency would not have quickly become many more. (Or if the fire engine had moved forward 60 feet to block the street, none of this would have happened).

As is the usual, New Haven sadly does nothing to improve the continual amount of dangerous situations (downtown that take place daily putting people continually at risk.