I had an appointment to get my first Covid vaccine shot today, so I decided to take a test drive to the place yesterday to make it easier to find the location early this morning. My journey on the Garden State Parkway started out normal enough. As I approached the Toms River area, the traffic started building up tremendously. Eventually, there was a road sign indicating that there was a crash up ahead. As I crawled past the crash, I only saw one car which was demolished already in position for its flatbed tow. There was no front end or rear end left of this vehicle. The car had the appearance of having rolled over. There must have been others involved but they were already cleared away.
As I got closer to exit 90 on the northbound side, I noticed what appeared to have been a massive fire on the southbound side of Lakewood. The smoke was so thick that it made visibility very difficult even for my side of the parkway. Figuring that some building was on fire in town, I continued to drive to my destination. I saw no indication of a fire while driving around the streets I was heading on to find my place of vaccination.
I quickly made my way back on to the parkway confident that I knew how to proceed this morning. I quickly noticed that the fire is still happening. Then, the traffic stops dead to not even a crawl but one big parking lot. The fire is now on both sides of the parkway!
Police cars and emergency vehicles were now pushing their way around the stopped traffic. Then, I noticed the planes and helicopters in the air. There were a few helicopters carrying water and dumping their cargo over the flames. I quickly turned on the radio only to find out that there was a fire in an industrial park that spread into a brush fire. Cars were attempting to exit the parkway by doing u-turns and riding the shoulder. That was fine until they were in the way of the emergency vehicles trying to make their way towards the fire.
People were getting out of their vehicles walking towards the excitement to see what was going on. Some were just walking their dogs along the side of the parkway. After being stuck in the same position for well over two hours, state troopers finally were directing us to turn around and exit through an opening in the divider to get to the northbound side and exit the parkway. Both sides of the parkway was shut down.
The exodus through the streets wasn't much better as everyone was funneled onto 549 and was pretty much stuck in a crawl for several miles. As I passed Route 70, I noticed that the road was closed as well. I was glad that my car had enough gas to handle this mess. I pray for those that were involved in this tragedy. In closing, my 45 minute test drive ended up lasting over five hours!