EDITORIAL 101 NIGHTMARE ACCIDENT EXPOSES FRAGILITY OF LOCAL TRANSPORTATION.

AS the new week starts, those of us who must brave the 101-Ventura Freeway as part of our daily commute must only pray that there won't be a repeat of last week's disaster.

Last Thursday's 12-hour sig alert in Agoura Hills was a frightening reminder of just how fragile our transportation system, as well as our modern way of life, really is.

All it took was a single errant driver - in this case, Gavin Charles Kleintop, who allegedly was driving drunk - to gum up the works for tens of thousands of commuters. Kleintop drove the wrong way on the freeway, causing a tanker to jackknife, spilling gasoline all over the road.

The rest, as they say, is history, or so we hope. Losing access to a single freeway was enough to put much of the region in turmoil for the better part of the day.

Amazingly, no one was killed or seriously injured. That's the silver lining to this story. But it's easy to see how, under certain circumstances, such an event could prove to be not just massively inconvenient, but disastrous for many.

And it's more than a little unsettling to see how little it takes to compromise our system of transportation and the conveniences we too often take for granted.