Last week sitting in afternoon meetings at the College of Eastern Utah news began to filter in that Highway 6, the main artery from Spanish Fork and the Wasatch front, was closed. Over the course of the next 30 minutes further news reached us that the situation was far worse than expected. A big rig carrying 58,000 lbs of explosives had burned and then, as explosives treated with fire are likely to do, it exploded. Nothing much remained in the crater that was created. Maybe an axle, maybe part of the engine block, and that was all.

Fortunately none of those traveling to our UEN retreat were injured. And fortunately no one was killed. The worst result for us was the need to find alternate routes home. It's great that the road system has built-in redundancies. Our biggest inconvenience was adding perhaps as much as an extra two hours and a hundred miles or so to the typical travel time. We all laughed when the first estimates for repairing the road came in at 6 - 8 hours. No way this was going to be fixed that fast.

The next morning estimates were revised and the outlook was for a return to normal traffic within 48 hours. That still seemed fanciful. I was somewhat surprised when UDOT was able to have traffic flowing on Highway 6 by the weekend. That had to be some great work.

A couple of days ago I had the opportunity to travel that route again. I expected for the repair to be very obvious. It wasn't. Barriers on the downhill side hid signs of the repair. The uphill side had been cleared of rubble. The patch of asphault made a smooth transition and with the expanse of the road seemed to be quite small. A minor miracle, really. Now we are going to expect this level of fast, efficient work in all road repair projects...........
11:28:04 PM    comment []