Jul. 3--Drivers found out Thursday just how bad gridlock in this region can get.

A broken water pump inside the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel set off a chain reaction of congestion. On the surface, the broken pump seemed like a tiny cog in the area's complex interstate bridge and tunnel system, but what happened next was more than anyone had bargained for.

When the bridge-tunnel's westbound lanes were closed, traffic congestion ended up stretching from morning to evening rush hours on the day before a busy holiday weekend.

While Virginia Department of Transportation crews pumped water out of the tunnel, detouring vehicles spilled onto alternate routes. Traffic at the Monitor Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel backed up more than 20 miles into Chesapeake. The Midtown and Downtown tunnel traffic was stacked up three to four miles into Norfolk, clogging city thoroughfares. The closures of some downtown streets for Harborfest compounded the fiasco.

Local leaders and others expressed outrage over the way VDOT handled the crisis and called the gridlock a harbinger of what could happen during a major evacuation.

They cited Thursday's events as an example of a limited highway system and inadequate harbor crossings.

"The entire region shut down for most of the day because of one pump," Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim said .

"We're told that the pump failed because of a storm last night that, as storms go, was fairly mild. If we were to have a major storm come through the region or a hurricane, we could have major loss of life."

VDOT spokeswoman Lauren Hansen said crews worked as quickly as possible to remedy what was an unpredictable situation.

That wasn't much help for drivers who couldn't avoid the chaos as about 100,000 vehicles that pass through the westbound HRBT mixed with hundreds of thousands on connecting arteries.

It took Eric Ferguson 90 minutes to get his stepfather, Michael Curry, from Ocean View to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, normally about a 20-minute drive. Curry had suffered a broken knee in a morning fall.

"It's been an all-day thing," Ferguson said. "Everywhere it's been bad."

The traffic was particularly rough on cargo carriers.

Meredith O'Keefe, assistant terminal manager for Gilco Trucking Co. in Portsmouth, said truckers, who have to criss-cross the region all day, couldn't make as many trips .

"If it takes all day to do one when he usually can do five to 10 in the same time ... it really slows them down," O'Keefe said.

She spent much of the day on the phone with customers asking about deliveries, but there was no screaming.