Pack your patience. Northpark Drive closed.

Pack Your Patience: Accident Closes Northpark in Both Directions

Update as of 6:30 PM: Outbound lanes have opened. One inbound lane open. Utility crews onsite.

Northpark Drive is closed in the worst possible place at the worst possible time – Friday night during rush hour in a construction zone. However, the accident that caused the closure is not related to construction.

A little before 3 PM, I got a tip about an accident at Russell-Palmer Road from Ralph De Leon, the project manager for the Lake Houston Redevelopment Authority’s Northpark Drive expansion project. He said that a truck had clipped a power pole and wires were down.

By the time I got there with my drone, police and fire trucks had Northpark closed off in both directions between Woodridge Drive and Russell-Palmer. However, I got my drone up from the parking lot of St. Martha’s Catholic Church to get the shots below. That was the easy part.

Getting home (about 2 miles away) took almost 45 minutes.

Bob Rehak

If you have a family member coming into Kingwood during the Friday evening rush hour, warn them to pack their patience. Utility lines are down across the road in BOTH directions.

According to De Leon, Northpark will be closed until the utility company can assess and repair the problem. That could take hours. It will be difficult just to get to the area. Avoid it at all costs.

Photos Taken at 3PM

Looking east along Northpark over Russell-Palmer. Note emergency vehicles blocking inbound traffic.
One utility pole has snapped and another one across Northpark appears to be leaning. However, that could be a shadow.

It’s not clear whether the utility lines carry communications or electricity. The downed line in the photo below is next to a power pole; you can tell by the transformer. So it may be a communications line.

The utility line appears to be caught on an eighteen wheeler blocking the inbound lanes.
The downed lines stretch from the truck to a snapped pole, across the ditch and then across the outbound lanes.

The inbound traffic was being funneled south on Russell-Palmer toward Kingwood Drive. See below.

The utility pole is snapped in half.
Here you can see the lines tangled on the truck. It’s unclear whether the truck struck the pole.
West of Russell-Palmer Traffic is backed up to 59 and maybe beyond.

People trying to enter Kingwood through back streets will find the slogging tough. Everyone who normally uses Northpark is trying to squeeze through stop signs not designed to handle this volume of traffic.

Stay away. If you simply can’t, pack your patience.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 4:30pm on 8/18/23

2180 Days after Hurricane Harvey