This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
As Nevada floods closed down Interstate 15 traffic headed for Las Vegas all week, the detoured traffic has been tearing up State Road 56 between Cedar City and the Nevada border.
"It wasn't built to handle that kind of traffic. So it caused a lot of potholes and has been breaking up," Jason Davis, operations director for the Utah Department of Transportation, told the Utah Transportation Commission on Friday.
The highway became part of a 200-mile detour around flooded areas by connecting with U.S. 93 near Caliente, Nev., to eventually rejoin I-15 just north of Las Vegas.
"The queue to get on the road was 24 miles long" at times in Utah, Davis said.
The traffic was so heavy, he added, "that it was like a long parking lot." He adds that S.R. 58 has virtually no shoulder, so when vehicles broke down or had problems, they blocked the roadway.
The extra traffic included many heavy semi trucks that proved to be too heavy for a road designed mostly for light-farm traffic.
S.R. 56 is among "level 2" roads that UDOT intentionally has done little to maintain in recent years — beyond filling potholes and sealing cracks — to allow it to better afford maintaining roads with heavier use. UDOT officials have said they were forced into that because of limited highway funding.
Davis said UDOT crews plan to inspect the road next week "to see what we need to do to keep it open for the rest of this year, and what we need to do to fix it long-term."
UDOT expected a single lane of I-15 to reopen late Friday in each direction between St. George and Las Vegas — and expected such single-lane access to last for up to another week.
Davis said initial plans would allow southbound freight trucks to use I-15, but not northbound trucks. He said that means the detour using S.R. 58 will continue to see heavy traffic for several more days.