Police have warned motorists of disruption to the Colombo-bound lane of the Colombo–Katunayake Expressway after a tank believed to contain chemicals fell onto the roadway on Thursday afternoon, NewsFirst reported.
The incident occurred on the section of the expressway between the New Kelani Bridge and the Peliyagoda Interchange, police said. The tank, whose contents were described only as suspected chemicals, came to rest on the carriageway and was affecting traffic movement towards Colombo.
The report was filed at 1:58 p.m. local time.
Where this is
The stretch named is the final approach into Colombo on the E03, the expressway that links the capital to Bandaranaike International Airport. It is the busiest connector on the network for airport traffic, and the Peliyagoda Interchange is where expressway traffic meets the Colombo–Kandy road.
The same section was one of two priority stretches in a Rs. 1,098.5 million lighting rehabilitation project the Cabinet approved in June, after theft and vandalism left roughly 85% of the expressway’s lighting inactive. The second package of that project covers the run from the New Kelani Bridge to the Peliyagoda Fish Market.
Network-wide, the four expressways carried 1,095,895 vehicles in the last week of August, a record week for the Road Development Authority.
Not reported
The NewsFirst account runs to three sentences and is the only report by a verified newsroom at the time of writing. It does not identify the chemical, say where the tank came from or whether a vehicle was involved, report any injury, state whether the lane was closed outright or merely slowed, name any emergency or hazardous-materials unit at the scene, or give an expected clearance time. Neither Ada Derana, Hiru, Daily Mirror nor the Road Development Authority’s expressway operations division had issued a notice when this was written.
