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Show UDOT Crews Complete Cleanup At Scenic 12 Site Where Giant Boulders Covered Roadway HENRIEVILLE Tuesday morning, workers were still blasting blast-ing the final boulders from an early morning slide of major proportions that covered Utah's Scenic Highway 12 the previous Thursday. Recent rains may have contributed to the instability at the site and it was also pointed out that the slide area lies on a fault, but there were no reports of earthquake acuvity in the area. "It's hard to say for sure, but it looks like it (the slide site) will slay put now," said Wade Barney, station supervisor at the Utah Department De-partment of Transportation's Escalante road shed. Ruby's Inn's Rod Syrett was on his way to Escalante with heavy equipment when he came across the slide about 5:30 a.m. and radioed Rubys Inn to forward the message - jo authorities. By then, several log trucks had begun to back up on the east side of the slide area. Ron Griffin whose home is in Aliens Canyon had also spotted the slide earlier before traffic began to back up. Celeste Bernards, Garfield County Sheriffs deputy, headed for the scene as well as Wade Barney, station supervisor at the Utah Department of Transportation Trans-portation road shed in Escalante who dispatched road workers from the Tropic and Escalante road shed with heavy equipment. Barney called UDOT's District 3 headquarters headquar-ters in Richfield for explosives handlers, han-dlers, then headed for the slide in a pickup. At the site, Bernards took over traffic control assisted by Barney. Road workers immediately began to cut a temporary road around the slide down through the willows and creek bed to allow traffic to flow through. A few 4-wheel-drive vehicles vehi-cles had been able to maneuver the off-road route, but it was 9 a.m. before be-fore large trucks could use the detour. de-tour. Barney estimates that between 500 to 600 cubic yards of material came down, completely covering the highway for a space of over 200 feet. He said that once the temporary tempo-rary detour was functioning, he put his men to work on the slide proper which contained eight or nine huge boulders 15 to 20-feet long. There were two loaders, a grader, air compressor com-pressor and jackhammer. While explosives handlers Don Bybee, Brent Christensen. maintenance mainte-nance supervisor for the southern end of District 3, and Ross Chris-tensen.District Chris-tensen.District 3 maintenance engineer, engi-neer, were on their way from Richfield, Rich-field, Barney's crew was drilling holes in the boulders to ready them for blasting. Explosives shot 10 holes the first round, five the second, then one, and finally, eight more, to reduce re-duce the boulders to manageable size. Barney said his crew worked 16 hours on Friday and seven on Saturday. Sat-urday. On hand for the hard work were Rick Bybee and Jeff Johnson of Tropic and Dan Cottam, Gary Spencer and Stanley Stowe of Escalante. , y.,, ' ; " ! I " ' 4. I s , , u " i j I Young area rodeos winners Tierney Richards, Kasidi Richards display buckles, tack and sad-brothers sad-brothers Shilo and Trinity Richards, and cousin dies, all prizes won by these young rodeo rides. |
