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Show New Highway Section Makes Cedar Accessible A new seciton of Interstate IS was opened to traffic August 13, making Cedar City more readily accessible to Garfield County residents traveling to the area. Many residents whoi traditionally travel to Cedar City using Utah Highway 20 (the Bear Valley highway) will find that they can travel via freeway from the intersection of U-20 with I-15 all the way to Cedar City. The final 11.7 mile portion of Ms between Fremont Wash, and Paragonah in southern Utah was opened by the Utah Department of Transportation just a week ago. This section completes , 187 uninterrupted miles of four lane, divided highway stretching from Scipio to the Arizona border. Only the 41 miles of M5 from Scipio to Nephl in central Utah and a 124 mile section from Tremonton to Plymouth in northern Utah still remain to be upgraded to interstate standards. Peter Kiewit and Sons Construction finished the work four and one-half months ahead of schedule under a total contract bid of $11,173,391. Contract time began in May of 1980. The road surface is composed of a nine and one-half inch layer of ' concrete laid over a four inch base of lean concrete (low cement content). UDOT Project Engineer Scott Munson supervised construction of the interstate project. Utah's Interstate system is almost 80 percent complete with the addition of this section. Included in this figure are 1-15, 1-70, 1-80, 1-84 and the 1-215 Belt Route serving Salt Lake County. "Conpletion of Utah's portion of the interstate system is still Utah's number one transportation priority," said William D. Hurley, UDOT Director. Under a "Fuel Price Adjustment" escalator clause included in the original contract, the contractor would have been able to recover additional fuel costs as the price of dlesel fuel rose. However, since the project was completed early, UDOT will retain the amount of those adjustments. Com putation of the total savings are not yet la |
