It was life in the slow lane.
The fallout from shutting down two lanes of the George Washington Bridge for nothing other than political payback was very real, say those who lived through it.
“You’re playing God with people’s jobs,” one irate woman fumed to the Port Authority, which runs the bridge.
The woman’s husband was 40 minutes late to a new job, after being out of work for a year, and she slammed the PA for “not caring about [its] customers,” according to documents released in the growing “Bridgegate” scandal.
Aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie allegedly orchestrated the September shutdown to get back at Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, who didn’t endorse Christie’s re-election bid. It created half-mile jams on local streets and funneled all traffic through a single, cash-only toll booth.
It lengthened a nightmare for a mother whose 4-year-old daughter had wandered off. Authorities couldn’t get across town to respond to the emergency, said Fort Lee Councilman Jan Goldberg.
A cop who happened to be in the area found the tot “by luck,” Goldberg said, but “for the time it takes, you’re talking about a mother, if you’re talking three or four minutes, that’s a lifetime.”
Emergency responders were delayed in getting to several medical calls, including cardiac arrests — a 91-year-old woman later died — and a multi-car accident.
“From what I understand it was a two-minute run that took 14 or 15 minutes,” Goldberg said of the response to the collision.
Richard Fried, 70, was taking his normal route from Bergen County through Fort Lee to his Upper West Side medical practice when he made a turn “and everything came to a complete stop. It wasn’t inching along; it just stopped.
“I was very angry — it’s just another example of political malfeasance and a lack of insight of how many lives are going to be inconvenienced or put at risk, just for some immediate ‘gotcha’ benefit,” he said.
Another angry resident called the PA, “saying he has a $1M home in Fort Lee and bought this home to be close to the bridge/work and pays a lot of taxes — why this change?” according to an internal PA e-mail describing the gripe and released Friday.
“He mentioned to me that if he doesn’t speak to anyone about this, he will go to the White House and media,” the e-mail continues.
When reached by The Post, the complainant, Manhattan physician Hicham Alnachawati, 42, said: “No one would live here if they saw traffic like this.”
When his 40-minute commute turned into an hour-and-45-minute odyssey, he thought a terrorist attack had taken place, Alnachawati said.
“This bridge is very important to the country . . . everything crosses your mind,” he said.
The political motive behind the jam shocked the Syrian native.
“It should be criminalized,” he said. “I couldn’t believe this, in America, this happened — the most Democratic country in the world.”