Blake Hertel thinks there’s a simple way to stop cars from flying off the road and into his parking lot. Just put up a fence. It’s been annoying for him to watch video after video of cars going down the slope.
“Every single accident we’ve seen could have been avoided,” Hertel said.
This is Hertel’s business, the Westphal Company, which takes care of the office and store complex at the corner of Fuerte Drive and Grossmont Boulevard in La Mesa, just off of Interstate 8. The Brigantine Seafood & Oyster Bar is also there.
When cars leave the road, they fall about 25 feet into the parking lot of the restaurant. The police found that it has happened at least seven times since 2021.
The most recent crash was just last month. It was the second one in less than two weeks. On Hertel’s surveillance film, a car flips over as it goes down the slope and hits a parked car with someone inside.
Hertel told us, “That’s my worst fear: getting a call one night saying someone got hit out in the parking lot.”
Shetel first told San Diego County Public Works about his worries in August 2021. Five months later, after another car had crashed down the slope, he reached out again.
Shetel said, “This is a real problem.” “This isn’t just happening once in a while; it’s happening more than once a year now.” I chose to do something about it after that.
An experienced county engineer responded with good news. The crossing was ready for a guardrail, but the engineer said it would take at least two years to build one.
The county then added a “double-headed arrow” sign and moved the “stop ahead” sign on Grossmont Boulevard closer to the crossing to help cars get through.
Hertel stopped reaching out because he was happy. until the beginning of this year, when more cars left the road. In January and February, he wrote the county and said it had been more than three years since they said they would add the plan to build a new guardrail to their list of projects. But no one from the county responded.
Shetel said, “I got left behind.” “Not a lot of replies. There wasn’t much follow-up.
“How many more of these are we going to have before things get worse?” Hertel spoke up.
Shetel told the county last month that he was going to tell the media. Within hours, security cams caught county workers putting up white posts near the intersection.
Shetel said, “The same day I told the media I was going to go, they put up white, reflective poles.” “That you can see now by going outside. That took them half a day to do. It would have been nice to have them put in four years ago.
Marisa Barrie has been the new Director of Public Works for San Diego County for about three months now.
Barrie said, “We did push to get that out there quickly as a response. It’s not that we were trying to avoid the media, but we were trying to recognize that he was upset and wanted to get that taken care of as soon as possible.” “I think we have a pretty good plan for taking care of our roads.”
The county has a big budget, but it still has a lot of work to do and can only do so many projects in a fiscal year. Barrie said that the county is in charge of 2,000 miles of roads.
She said that the request for a guardrail between Grossmont and Fuerte is one of 76 other projects that haven’t been paid yet. In four of those projects, there is no guardrail at all. In the other projects, the guardrails need to be updated to meet modern standards. They might also need to be fixed up or added to.
For the same amount of money, those guardrail projects have to fight with adding bike lanes, traffic lights, sidewalks, new curbs, and fixing roads. Barrie said that projects are put first in places where there have been the most accidents or deaths.
Later, a county official told Investigates in an email that accident reports are just one of many things the county looks at. Some of these are the speed limit, the number of lanes, and the road’s slope or bend.
A hole in the way the county finds out about car accidents
The county takes care of the part of Fuerte Drive that goes over the four-way stop, but the parking lot below is in the city of La Mesa.
In their investigation, the police and fire departments of La Mesa and Heartland were called to the scene of at least two accidents since 2021 that were linked to the crossing of Fuerte Drive and Grossmont Boulevard.
The county only got news of the crash from Hertel, not from first responders, Barrie said.
“We had never heard from the police about an accident at that intersection,” Barried said.
The county said that the only data it looks at is from the California Highway Patrol’s Crash Reporting System. Police departments are only required by law to send crash data to the CHP if someone is hurt or killed in the crash.
Police looked through that database and only found one of the seven confirmed crashes listed. That was the most recent one, which happened in May and hurt someone.
When the county hadn’t heard from Hertel in a few years, Barrie said they thought the signs they put up in 2022 had fixed the issue, so they didn’t give the job top priority.
Barrie said, “When we left him, we thought we had a good plan.” “If there had been a major accident and we got a report about it, that would have brought our attention back there.”
The county still isn’t sure if they want to put up a curb or not.
“We need to find the crux of the matter.” Do you need something to keep cars from going off the edge of the hill? Or is it that not enough people are being warned? Barrie told him.
Barrie told us that a fence might make things worse.
“If we put a guardrail there, it might be worse for people to hit that guardrail than to roll down that slope,” Barrie said.
The county also says that putting a guardrail costs a lot of money. A spokesperson said it would cost more than $500,000 to do the plan, geotechnical study, build the retaining wall, guardrail, and get the right-of-way.
For now, the county will spend about $50,000 this fall putting up a white fence along the edge of the cliff. A car could still drive over the edge, but the new fence is meant to catch drivers’ attention and bring attention to the strange stop.
Barrie said, “I can’t wait for this barricade to be put up and see how that changes how people drive in that intersection.” “Because if we put this up for less money and then there are no more problems, I wouldn’t want to spend the money on a guardrail if it wasn’t needed.”
Investigators tried to get in touch with the Brigantine Seafood & Oyster Bar’s parent company more than once. We never heard from them again.
Tell the county about a problem with a road.
The county made a website where you can report potholes, damaged roads, and broken signs or make suggestions for ways to make the roads safer.
It also has the Tell Us Now app for reporting problems that aren’t emergencies.
