This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated.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.

Cedar City • Nevada's application for emergency federal funds to fix flood damage that closed Interstate 15 for a week earlier this month is about to include something unusual: a plea for $6 million to $7 million to fix a highway in neighboring Utah.

Utah State Road 56 — between Cedar City and the Nevada line — became part of a 200-mile detour between Cedar City and Las Vegas when I-15 closed. The small highway usually carries just 500 vehicles a day and instead handled 25,000 — a 50-fold increase.

It is not designed for that.

All the extra traffic, including heavy trucks, caused severe and long tire ruts, potholes, cracking and many bumps akin to a wavy washboard, said Kevin Kitchen, spokesman for the Utah Department of Transportation.

So he said Utah is preparing forms to piggyback onto Nevada's emergency application, hoping to find funds to fix the highway "and bring the damaged ride level back to what it was prior to the I-15 closure."

Kitchen said it would include leveling much of the surface, adding pavement and then applying a new chip-seal coat. The experience, he added, has Utah officials discussing whether to upgrade regular maintenance and design of the road, since it is now clear that it can be called into service as an emergency backup to I-15.

SR-56 now is among "level 2" roads that UDOT intentionally has done little to maintain in recent years to allow the agency to better afford maintaining roads with heavier use. UDOT has said it was forced into that approach because limited funding has not allowed it to maintain all highways, so it had to prioritize.

Kitchen said SR-56 now might be considered for designation as a level 1 highway or at least to receive some enhanced maintenance.

"If we were to use the traffic measurements we had there for a few days, I imagine we are already there" for making the stretch a higher-priority level 1 road.

Kitchen said the corridor between Las Vegas and southern Utah is not only important locally, but also nationally. "A lot of produce from California travels on refrigerated trucks through there, and it is a key transportation corridor for food and goods to the Midwest and East."

On Sept. 8, flooding in Nevada closed I-15 to all traffic for a week and forced motorists to use the SR-56 alternative.

Northbound I-15 truck traffic also was diverted to the detour for an additional eight days, for 17 hours a day, when I-15 was limited to a single open lane in each direction.

Kitchen said the detour initially turned SR-56 into a long parking lot — with backups stretching more than 22 miles. That caused the worst damage on the section of the road from the Nevada line to 22 miles within Utah.

The road has little shoulder for much of the length or is soft — so heavier trucks would sink if they went off the road.

Any flat tires or vehicles running out of fuel tended to back up the entire highway because of little shoulder space and heavy traffic in both directions.

Kitchen said UDOT sent extra Incident Management Teams to the highway to try to help disabled vehicles. Crews also did quick, ongoing fixes of major potholes that developed to keep traffic moving.

Kitchen said Utah and Nevada highway officials discovered some issues that need to be addressed. In Cedar City, where SR-56 connects to I-15, there is no dedicated left-turn signal for traffic trying to enter the freeway there. "So we had to have people flagging that intersection."

In Nevada, where the extension of SR-56 connects to U.S. 93, larger semis could not complete the turn without blocking all lanes and oncoming traffic on U.S. 93 — so a redesign may come there.