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The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) says the mess from a wreck on I-15 Tuesday was one of the worst they've seen in years.
It all started when a semi truck, hauling an extra large load, rolled over a couple hours before rush hour. But problems only continued from there.
The 210,000-pound payload is still sitting off of I-15, waiting to be picked up. It's huge! Now throw it on its side across the freeway, and you get a traffic nightmare affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
"Usually when there's a lot of traffic, it's still moving a little bit. But this wasn't moving at all," commuter Ricky Ortega said.
It was nothing but brake lights heading north on I-15. "We knew coming in that we weren't going home for a while," driver Skip Baxter said.
A specially-designed payload was on its side, blocking the northbound lanes near the Center Street exit in North Salt Lake. Traffic was backed up for eight hours.
"This is what happens when you give stupid people a driver's license," driver Mason Martinez said.
The accident left plenty of frustrated drivers, but others were stranded thanks to hours of idling in the hot sun. "We had motorists overheating. We had motorists that were running out of gas," explained UDOT spokesman Nile Easton.
UDOT not only helped direct traffic and patch damaged road, but its crews provided roadside service to about 20 drivers and moved seven abandoned vehicles to the side of the road.
"It's hard to come up with one that was this bad. This happened to be just in the worst possible place it could be, where it actually really was blocking two interstates. It was blocking 215 and I-15," Easton said.
Drivers could only watch as large cranes slowly moved the rig off the road. UDOT says part of what made the accident worse is there were no alternate routes.
"Sometimes you do need a plan C if A and B don't work," Baxter said.
The drivers we spoke to, and UDOT, hope Legacy Parkway, set to open in September, will help prevent something like this from happening again.
"It would take at least a third of the people off this highway if we had that freeway going up through there," commuter Ron Chatwin said.
But some aren't so sure the new parkway will help. "I mean, yeah, it'll be an extra road. But there's tons of people coming into the state yearly, so it'll create a cluster regardless. It's just another road some idiot's going to roll his car on," Martinez said.
So who's going to pay for this mess? UDOT says it is. The state insurance company will go after the trucking company, and UDOT expects to eventually be reimbursed.
E-mail: wjohnson@ksl.com
