FAYETTEVILLE -- A series of four traffic lights on Wedington Drive at the Interstate 49 interchange guides traffic like valves in a slow-beating heart, letting bursts of vehicles move from one chamber to the next throughout the day.
But some of those valves temporarily stopped working during the Friday evening rush hour of Memorial Day weekend, when two lights repeatedly blinked red on the west side of the interstate. The problem has affected several busy crossings in the past month and means drivers should act as though an intersection is an all-way stop.
Brad Anderson, city traffic control supervisor, said Friday that similar issues typically pop up once a week somewhere in the city. Switch failures and electrical surges, even lightning strikes, can cause a group of traffic lights to default to the flashing red, he said.
"When your electricity goes out, usually it just goes out and comes back on, but because of the safety features in the controllers," the lights halt normal functions, Anderson said.
"Nothing lasts forever," he added. "It's going to happen."
Larger intersections, with more traffic to potentially be disrupted, can be more susceptible to the surges that can trip the lights, Anderson said.
"It works like a big antenna as far as lightning surges and power surges," he said. "We have as much surge protection capability in them as we can stick in them."
Similar failures happened at the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and I-49 interchange recently, including one around lunchtime. Police are sometimes dispatched to guide traffic until the light system can be reset by a technician.
Sgt. Craig Stout with the Fayetteville Police Department said he wasn't aware of any accidents caused by the failures.
The technician who resets the lights can manually control them to quickly get traffic flowing normally, Anderson said.
Martin Luther King Boulevard and Shiloh Drive on Friday morning seemed to be affected by another failure, with the light to turn onto King seemingly stuck on red and officers directing traffic. Anderson said police were asked to control traffic for thousands of Wal-Mart shareholders attending the annual meeting at Walton Arena.
Metro on 06/06/2016