Rush hour traffic heading along Norwich Road came to a standstill on Tuesday after temporary traffic lights stopped working.
Motorists who use the road are facing a week of delays after a sewer collapsed on Monday. Engineers from Anglian Water moved in to start work – but were nowhere to be seen during Tuesday’s rush hour.
Neither were the traffic lights – they stopped working and although there were manual stop/go boards stacked at the side of the road there was no one to operate them.
Therefore while traffic was able to get out of town, nothing was able to drive towards central Ipswich – traffic was stationary from All Saints Road to beyond the Norwich Road bridge.
An Anglian Water spokeswoman said: “We know how disruptive roadworks can be and we’re sorry for any inconvenience caused by an outage on the temporary traffic lights on Norwich Road, Ipswich.
“For the rest of the week a member of staff will arrive on site from 7am to make sure the traffic lights are in good working order.
“Anglian Water engineers are working to repair a collapsed sewer and to make sure our staff and customers are kept safe traffic lights have been put in place.
“We’ll be working on Norwich road for the rest of this week and hope to get things back to normal for the start of the new working week.”
On Monday night traffic heading out of town was at a virtual standstill on all routes in the area including Chevallier Street, Yarmouth Road and Valley Road.
And traffic on Norwich Road was at a standstill all the way to Civic Drive.
The heavy congestion on Monday was compounded this evening by two crashes reported to police.
Officers were first called to a report at 5.35pm that a Renault had crashed into a lamppost at the Springfield Lane junction.
The owner had left and locked the vehicle when police arrived, but it is not causing serious delays to traffic, police said.
At about 5.45pm, a cyclist was involved in a collision with a vehicle in Norwich Road nearby, but was not seriously injured.
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