OUR TRAFFIC WILL DRIVE US TO DRINK.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I have an ability both rare and worthless.

For reasons science cannot explain and isn't particularly interested in, I am drawn to road construction traffic snarls the way Madonna is drawn to reprehensible public behavior. You could drop me into the middle of a strange city during a power failure on a moonless night, tie my hands behind my back, blindfold me, jam corks up my nose and put carrots in my ears - and still, within five minutes of finding the ignition switch with my tongue, I would be stuck in a traffic jam because of road construction.

Now, if I could only use this power for good.

I could locate a road construction site on my way to the moon. I once got caught between two ``road closed because of construction'' signs while in the empty part of Montana. It was like a living Mobius strip.

Two months ago, I parked in the empty lot of a brand new Sav-on on Santa Monica Boulevard. When I came out of the store, they had dug a hole behind my car and were planting a tree in it. So I shouldn't have been surprised when large caverns started to appear on Burbank Boulevard.

You see, I spend a lot of time on Burbank. It's convenient: Four lanes wide and running all the way from Valley Circle to the Verdugo Hills. Which is probably why the Department of Water and Power decided to dig it up.

Starting in June 2001, holes began to appear in the middle of Burbank. Overnight large equipment suddenly gathered around them, like herds of gnus around a watering hole on the African savanna. Gigantic cranes would arch into the sky. Fat concrete trucks would sit and roll their loads for endless hours. Flatbeds loaded with sections of 54-inch pipe were constantly backing up and pulling forward and backing up again. And so you wouldn't miss one moment of these impromptu performances, Burbank was closed to one lane in each direction.

Traffic backed up for blocks. Driving to Costco became a day trip.

And then after months of this activity and without warning, the entire menagerie would disappear, vanish in the night like your youth and affordable auto insurance, leaving behind only the memory of exhaust fumes and perhaps some big steel plates cemented into the road. And you would think, ``Well, they're done here.''

But you would be wrong. In one of those cruel little jokes of urban life, just when the congestion and frustration was beginning to fade from your memory - Boom! - they would be back, all of them, the hole, the cranes, the cement trucks and the 30 minutes to get though one intersection.

Clearly they were building something underground, but it seemed as if they built it, left it and then they came back to tear it down again. And then they came back to rebuild it. It was as if the chief engineer on the project was Sisyphus.

OK, there's nothing new about road work like this. The Roman poet Ovid may be best known in our own day for his book ``Metamorphoses,'' but during his own lifetime, Ovid's most popular poem was his epic of lost love titled ``I missed you at the Orgy of Bacchus because of construction work on the Apian Way.'' And Romans also invented the art of subcontracting their road work, as evidenced by Julius Caesar's famous line, ``I came, I saw, I got stuck in traffic.''

I finally called the Department of Water and Power and spoke to Jerry Delgado, the assistant manager of the Business Unit for Water Districts, and according to Jerry, my nemesis was the Burbank Trunk Line, 17,764 feet of pipe running from someplace in North Hollywood to someplace in Van Nuys and managing to get in my way as often as possible while doing so.

Jerry tried to sound sympathetic, but he seemed obsessed with getting drinkable water to my house. Jerry explained that once the pipe was laid, it had be sprayed with a water-resistant paint and sealant, which had to cure for a few days, which was why the construction crews disappeared and later reappeared to spray on a second coat. And maybe a third. They also had to install butterfly valves and service vaults so the new pipeline could be repaired in the future.

And they call those reasonable explanations for backing up traffic.

These people have their priorities all screwed up. I'm an Angeleno. I don't want to drink. I want to drive.