By Eric Heyl, December 14, 2013
Held hostage by PennDOT?
Sounds preposterous. The state Transportation Department deals in road construction, not sudden abduction.
But what happened to more than 20 motorists
on Thursday usually occurs only to tourists who make the ill-advised
decision to venture off Mexico's main highways. Their journeys were
abruptly interrupted not by banditos, but by PennDOT workers who greatly
overstepped the authority they didn't possess to begin with.
The drivers were traveling through the Fort
Pitt Tunnels when their vehicles were commandeered by a PennDOT truck
and herded into a maintenance area immediately outside the tunnel. They
were told they were forbidden to leave.
“We were all just taken aback by what was
going on,” Carissa Mendez, 26, of Aliquippa told WPXI-TV. “There was no
law enforcement there, and we were all held in this area. We were
blocked in on each side by PennDOT trucks.”
The PennDOT workers accused their prisoners
of running a light at the tunnel entrance that had turned red to halt
traffic and enable them to remove ice accumulations inside the tunnels.
That the motorists insisted the light had
switched from red to green did not appease their captors. The motorists
were told they were being detained until the state police arrived to
issue them citations.
The hostages spent about an hour in
captivity, even though PennDOT has no authority to confine anyone,
regardless of their alleged disregard of the motor vehicle code. That
power rests with the police, not some guys in trucks knocking down
icicles with shovels.
PennDOT spokesman Steve Cowan acknowledged
that fact on Friday, saying the employees' actions “went against our
policy. We are not to detain any motorists.”
Cowan said PennDOT is continuing to
investigate what caused the traffic signal at the tunnel entrance to
apparently malfunction.
“Whether it was a system failure or a
human error, we're not certain at this point, But we want to get to the
bottom of this,” he said.
Cowan wouldn't reveal whether the workers had been disciplined, saying he can't discuss a personnel matter.