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Cedar City • State Road 14 near Cedar City likely won't be open to traffic until next summer.
The two-lane highway was closed earlier this month after a massive landslide tore out or damaged a 1,700-foot section of the highway eight miles east of Cedar City, a popular route to connect with U.S. Highway 89.
The slide is estimated to have moved 1.5 million cubic yards of earth and debris onto a section of road between the southwestern Utah city and the junction with State Road 148, which is 17 miles east of Cedar City and provides access to Cedar Breaks National Monument as well as State Road 143, the road to Brian Head Resort.
The slide is 100 feet deep in places.
Utah Department of Transportation spokesman Kevin Kitchen said Friday that aerial surveys of the slide have been completed and are being analyzed to decide what design work is needed to replace the section of highway.
A cost has not yet been determined. A private contractor probably will be hired by the end of November. The project is expected to be finished by June.
No one was injured in the slide, which happened early in the morning on Oct. 8 after heavy precipitation in the area. Kitchen said the highway has been affected by major slides in the past, with the most recent big ones occurring in 1992 and 1993 just up the canyon from the latest one.
UDOT engineer Jim McConnell said that after the earlier slides, repairs were made to protect water resources and slope stability. "The good news is our structural repairs from that [earlier] slide appear to have held up," he said.
Kitchen said costs associated with the landslides in the 1990s was $3.8 million.
Because of the road closure, snow removal on the highway will be maintained only from the U.S. Highway 89 corridor to Navajo Lake. UDOT will work with local agencies to try to provide access points for recreational use and owners of cabins or livestock at Duck Creek Village and Navajo Lake and to SR 143 above Brian Head. UDOT is allocating additional resources to SR 143 in an effort to keep the road open as much as possible, said Kitchen.
The seasonal closure of SR 148 because of heavy snow will remain in effect during the winter. —
Project updates
The project on repairs to State Road 14 and how to subscribe to email updates are available by visiting the "Projects Under Construction" section of UDOT's Web page at http://www.udot.utah.gov/go/projects.