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Show Maintenance Takes Spotlight on Highway Program It is an unusually busy season sea-son for highway maintenance forces. Because of the long cold winter and the repeating spring thaws, surface damage in the State of Utah are worse than for many years. All available maintenance men are on the job in an effort to keep ahead of the growing number of "chuck holes" appearing appear-ing daily in the 5,626 miles of State Roads, to say nothing of 3,292 miles of city streets; 17,754 miles of county roads; 5,666 miles of Forest Service roads; 415 miles of Indian Service roads; 1,564 miles of military roads; and 5 miles of Bureau of Reclamation roads in the State. There is a total of 34,322 miles of streets, roads and highways in Utah most of which seem to b? in need of some kind of maintenance main-tenance work. The floods during the month of February caused extensive damage to State Highways throughout Utah. C. Taylor Burton, Bur-ton, Director of Highways, Utah State Department of Highways estimated the damage due to floods between $750,000 and $1,-000,000. $1,-000,000. Flood waters washed away fills spporting pavement portions of highway shoulders and even large segments of an entire highway in spots. "Unreasonable weather changes have caused the most extensive break-up of the state's highways in years," Mr. Burton stated. Three areas suffered most of the flood damage; northern Utah, Millard and Juab counties in central Utah, and the northeastern north-eastern portion of the state. Damage Dam-age in northern part of Utah, principally in Box Elder County, was estimated at over one-quarter of a million dollars. Perhaps the hardest hit of all were Juab and Millard Counties in the west-central west-central portion of Utah. It will cost approximately $185,000 to rebuild U.S. 91 between Levan and Scipio, for example. In northeastern north-eastern Utah including Daggett, Dag-gett, Duchesne, Wasatch, and Utah counties the damage came to another $200,000. Because of these unforseen expenses ex-penses in highway maintenance, the Utah State Road Commission was forced to hold back construction con-struction activities, to a degree, to insure that enough money would be available to take care of road repairs. Maintenance activities accounted ac-counted for $5,337,126 of the State Highway Department's budget during the last fiscal year. This is second only to construction con-struction costs. The maintenance total, which comes solely from State taxes, while construction expenditures are on a federal time this summer. Full-scale construction activity on the more than sixty highway projects, suspended for the winter win-ter throughout the state, will resume re-sume within the next few weeks weather permitting. matching formula, will very likely be even higher this year than last because of the extensive exten-sive damage and break-up of the highways this spring. Construction activity in Utah is still mostly suspended for the winter season. A few projects are getting underway early, however. how-ever. Two of these including the $1.6 million fill project on Interstate Inter-state 15 between Orem and Provo in Utah County, and the Capitol Reef National Monument road between Fruita and Caine-ville Caine-ville in Wayne County. The latter lat-ter is a one-million-dollar project proj-ect on U-24, 9 miles in length, on the east side of the National Monument. Construction does not interfere with traffic in the area -because it is a new road location. The project is more than 90 per cent completed at present, pres-ent, and surfacing is scheduled for completion probably some- |