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AMERICAN FORK -- The Utah Department of Transportation is calling this past weekend's project of moving two bridge sections into place a success.
The bridges are part of a new interchange being built in American Fork to connect Interstate 15 to the soon-to-be-opened Pioneer Crossing.
The bridge move required I-15 to be closed for two nights over the weekend -- both Friday night and Sunday night -- but UDOT says moving the 2,200-ton bridges went off without a hitch.
"Both bridges were in place by about 3 a.m. each morning; and it took just a few hours to get the self-propelled modular transports off the freeway, but we had things open to traffic by about 6 a.m. both days," said UDOT spokesman Scott Thompson.
The massive bridges were moved at a snail's pace, but the 186-foot-long structures are now over I-15, which will comprise what is known as a diverging diamond interchange.
The interchange is the first of its kind in Utah, and is designed to make traffic flow through the interchange much more efficient. When it opens up, traffic will crisscross over the bridges, requiring fewer stoplights for traffic to move through.
It's all part of the Pioneer Crossing project, a new highway between the freeway and Redwood Road in Saratoga Springs. UDOT still is hopeful that Pioneer Crossing will be open by early September.
"We're down to the last few things," Thompson said. "There's concrete paving to do; we're putting in sound walls; we're putting in landscaping, curb and gutter -- all those sort of things. [We're] finishing all those intersections, putting in a few traffic signals and those sort of things."
This project is not actually part of the I-15 CORE rebuild project, which just got underway, but the new interchange and the section of freeway is being built to fit right in with the CORE project.
E-mail: spenrod@ksl.com
