Falling concrete beam takes a bite out of tollway

Ah, now Houstonist remembers why we're totally avoiding the Katy Freeway area these days: falling concrete beams. Or at least one falling concrete beam — one that took a chunk out of a Sam Houston Tollway guardrail yesterday afternoon, narrowly missing passing traffic and closing the tollway for a couple of hours.

It happened around 3:30 p.m. as Williams Bros., one of the contractors building the new mega-Katy Freeway, was tearing down a column at the Katy-Sam Houston Tollway interchange. "The contractor was bringing the column down and the reinforcing steel twisted slightly and skewed the angle that it was coming down, and it grazed the rail of the main lanes," Raquelle Lewis, spokeswoman for the Katy Freeway reconstruction project, told the Chronicle. The column fell to the ground, grazing the concrete wall alongside the elevated southbound lanes of the Sam Houston Tollway; fortunately, no one was injured.

A southbound lane and the shoulder of the tollway were closed from about 3:40 to 5:25 p.m. — just the time you don't want to have a freeway closure in west Houston — but things are apparently OK now.