LOS ANGELES – The alarms have been sounded and the preparations have been made.
Now, only two questions remain: Will “Carmageddon,” the shutdown of a 10-mile stretch of one of the busiest highways in the United States, on one of the city’s busiest of summer weekends, bring the City of the Angels to its knees?
Or will this too come to pass, just like so many other predictions of the apocalypse? (Remember the Oakland radio preacher who just last spring put up billboards promising the world would end on May 21.)
“Like Y2K,” Ashley Nazarian said dismissively, referring to the much-hyped worldwide computer data meltdown that never happened as the clock turned to Jan. 1, 2000.
Nazarian, property manager for the Sherman Oaks Galleria, a mall that is located next to an exit on the affected stretch of the 405, might be worried but she isn’t.
Word that part of the freeway will be shut down for 53 hours beginning at midnight Friday has been spread so far and wide by now that she believes people will stay away.
Still, the UCLA Health System, which runs the huge Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, is taking no chances.
It has three helicopter companies on standby to transport patients and
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