A fatal wreck on the Pali Highway stymied Kailua-bound traffic for more than seven hours yesterday morning after a 35-year-old man's car flew off the roadway and down a 40-foot embankment.

Police are investigating the crash as a racing incident, and asked the driver of a second vehicle to come forward.

Killed was Terance Daniel Lee, 35, of Kailua, police said.

Kailua police received a 911 call just before 2 a.m. yesterday from a caller complaining of two cars racing. According to a witness, Lee's car, a 2004 Nissan 350Z, raced with a dark-colored vehicle.

Lee's car hit the right embankment, skidded for several yards, then went over the edge, Honolulu police Capt. Frank Fujii said.

Police also said evidence suggests alcohol was a factor.

According to witnesses, the other driver stopped at the scene after the crash, then drove away.

Police closed all Kailua-bound lanes of Pali Highway from 1:42 a.m. until 9:30 a.m. yesterday. That focused attention on the conflict between the need to thoroughly investigate a major collision and the need for free-flowing traffic.

Had the accident occurred in the town-bound lane, the rush-hour traffic situation could have been worse, said Scott Ishikawa, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation.

"Aside from this being a tragedy, I'm not sure how much it affected morning rush-hour traffic," he said. "We didn't get any calls (complaining)."

Yesterday's wreck was among several recent incidents in which officers closed a major road for hours, including a police pursuit on Dec. 14 that ended when a van rammed into traffic in Kalani Valley. Traffic on Kalaniana'ole Highway backed up for about four hours.

Residents along four-lane Farrington Highway — the only road in and out of the Wai'anae Coast — can't count the number of times that road has been closed for hours, sometimes in both directions.

One time was after a multivehicle crash July 23, 2003, killed a motorcycle officer and a 10-year-old girl near Honokai Hale.

Other shutdowns have been the result of fires, water main breaks and once, a hostage situation that paralyzed Farrington Highway for 13 hours.

"I get stuck in those things about once every couple of months," said Wai'anae resident Gary Char, who's among the minority of residents who remain stoic about the situation.

"I'd say about three-fourths of the population over here gets upset about it. The last one I remember I was sitting there for about an hour and a half. I think that was about three months ago."

In yesterday's wreck on the Pali Highway, officers completed their investigation of the scene before dawn, but tow crews could not retrieve the car until daybreak given its precarious position down the embankment.

The crash was on the Windward side of the Pali tunnels. Police investigators and a city work crew spent hours yesterday gathering evidence, recovering the man's body, and hauling the car up the embankment.

It has long been the policy of police departments across the country to close major roads and thoroughfares for as long as it takes to thoroughly investigate fatal and critical traffic accidents.

Honolulu police maintain they need to preserve the integrity of the scene while safely gathering critical evidence.

In the past, police and officials with the state Department of Transportation have pointed out that on the Mainland, there are significantly more alternative routes that motorists can take when major thoroughfares are shut down. The lack of extensive surface streets here compounds the problem of one accident creating mass chaos.

Fujii said the department's new policy allows patrol officers to investigate single-car, fatal accidents. Traffic officers no longer have to respond, which speeds the investigation and reduces traffic congestion, he said.

"We are very aware of the fact that when we close roads it causes inconvenience for the public," Fujii said. "We want to conduct an investigation that is thorough, and we will not do anything to jeopardize the integrity of the investigation."

Officers in two Mainland jurisdictions, Phoenix and Las Vegas, said inconvenience to motorists should not govern collision investigations.

In Phoenix, police will shut down a roadway for as long as it takes to properly investigate a collision, said Detective Anthony Morales, a 35-year veteran of the department.

"We need to allow our investigators time to conduct a thorough and safe investigation, whether that takes three hours or 23 hours," he said by telephone yesterday. "We need to preserve that (area of the accident) as a possible crime scene. We cannot let pedestrians and traffic through the crime scene."

One of the reasons fatal traffic investigations take so long is because officers need to gather evidence for the local investigation and information for a federal database. Police departments are required to submit an information sheet about every fatal accident that is uploaded into the Fatality Analysis Reporting System maintained by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

FARS provides "very valuable" information, said Frank Moretti, director of policy and research for TRIP, a national transportation research group headquartered in Washington, D.C.

"The federal reporting of fatal accidents is very useful to researchers in making advances in traffic safety," he said by telephone yesterday. "You want the same data gathered for a fatality in Honolulu as the one in Miami."

The data help researchers map trends like the number of fatal accidents involving drugs, alcohol or bad weather.