In a week's time – at 9am to be precise – Bulli Pass will be closed.

And that will be the cue for all hell to break loose, according to some in the Illawarra.

Those Illawarra residents who drive to Sydney for work have been making plans to stay overnight at friends’ houses rather than take one of the detour routes.

People living along Lawrence Hargrave Drive – one of two detour routes – are wondering if they’ll be able to cross that road in peak hour with all the expected extra traffic.

Others are suggesting Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) are taking the easy option by closing the road completely rather than leaving a lane open during peak periods.

Any time the Mercury’s Facebook page includes a story on the closure, it draws a raft of critical comments.

So much so that it seems as though the closure of the pass will be the worst thing to happen to the region. Ever.

Except that it’s happened before.

In 2008 the pass was closed for six weeks. And, if the Mercury archives from that year are any indication, it caused barely a ripple of concern.

You could count the number of letters to the editor about the issue on the fingers of one hand – and still have a few fingers left over.

Seems that back in 2008 we worked around the inconvenience of the closure and just got on with things.

In 2016, it is a massive catastrophe.

Yet, if RMS were to do nothing about the unstable rock face of Bulli Pass it would surely only be a matter of time before we had a real catastrophe – a death caused by a falling rock.

This is something that seems to have gotten lost amidst all the outrage – that the work is likely to end up stopping someone from being seriously injured or killed.

As a reminder of that let’s go back to February 2015 when a falling rock hit Colin Bird’s car (pictured left).

Mr Bird suffered internal bleeding, a cracked rib, fractured vertebrae and soft tissue damage to his stomach.

“The car just exploded,” Mr Bird said.

“It literally sounded like something exploded. The steering wheel was smashed into pieces by the rock. Even though I was steering, I don’t actually know if I had control or not.”

A little inconvenience seems vastly more preferable to that.