Quote:
A section of the M3 motorway is closed in both directions after reports of "potential hazardous material" on the road, police have said.
Thousands of motorists are caught in queues on the motorway and surrounding roads.
Police said a bomb disposal team was at the scene of the closure between junctions nine and 11 at Winchester.
The incident was first reported at about 04:00 BST. Motorists have been advised to find alternative routes.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-41371699
This comes after a huge similar problem on the M1 a few days ago caused by what looks like a 5l container of hydrochloric acid which had reacted with something and been dumped.
Obviously the authorities need to exercise caution but if we're going to close motorways every time something odd is discovered the whole country could virtually be brought to a halt without much effort. There doesn't seem to be any real plan for mitigating the effects of these incidents, getting stranded motorists off the affected roads or preventing them joining them for a good period after the problem is discovered. I suspect a large part of the problem is treating these incidents as terrorist related (which of course they could be) and then having to wait for suitably trained personnel to turn up and do what they need to do. The problem is that any budding terrorists out there could well see this chaos and conclude that an easy way to create mayhem, will be to dump containers of stuff on our motorway network. What it is doesn't really matter because the police will treat them all as potentially hazardous and close the roads until it can be proved otherwise.
If that were to happen surely someone somewhere would need to make the decision to either allow parts of our motorway network to be paralysed on a regular basis or adopt a rather different strategy of dealing with them to minimise the risk to Joe Public and/or provide an efficient means by which to divert them away. Regularly forcing large numbers of people to spend countless hours stuck on the motorway isn't really tenable is it?