SR-18 Passing Lanes; St. George, UT
This project consists of a 2 mile passing lane on SR-18. UDOT and Washington County partnered up to get this project completed before the 2022 Ironman World Championship. The project consisted of 25,000 cy of roadway excavation, import of 11,000 cy of granular borrow, 5,000 cy of road base, and 5,500 ton of HMA, along with culvert extensions, signage and delineators
One of the main challenges to this project was the timeline. Sunroc bid on the project in February and had to start the project 2 weeks later with a deadline of May 1st. Failure to complete the project on time would be assessed as major liquidated damages. With such a tight timeframe we had to use multiple excavation crews that consisted of using multiple track hoes. We used our side dumps to off-haul the excess material and to import all the granular borrow and road base.
The other challenge encountered while completing the initial roadway excavation was a large area of rock that required us to hire a blaster to break the rock up in order to get the roadway section complete. This hidden rock created a small delay in the excavation but with proper authorization, the blast was successful in breaking up the rock and making it possible to continue excavating the new lane.