Gridlock

It took me an hour to get to work this morning because of "an incident" which later turned out to have been a man being dragged along under a bus, the way it was reported suggesting that the incident had occurred during the rush hour, but oh no it was at about 5 am - so what were the emergency services doing for three hours during which time a considerable part of East London was gridlocked?
And this is not the first time that this sort of thing has happened. Every time there is some kind of accident or mishap on the road it seems that the emergency services (and the police in particular) deal with the matter by closing the road for as long as possible rather than ensuring that things are dealt with swiftly and everything returns to normal as soon as.