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March 28, 2024 7:01 pm
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Moving Mountains To Re-Open I-15

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

After being closed for four days, Interstate 15 was re-opened on Friday with one lane in each direction between Glendale and the Logandale/Overton exits. Constructions crews are still working around the clock to repair the southbound side which received the most damage. PHOTO BY VERNON ROBISON/Moapa Valley Progress.
After being closed for four days, Interstate 15 was re-opened on Friday with one lane in each direction between Glendale and the Logandale/Overton exits. Constructions crews are still working around the clock to repair the southbound side which received the most damage. PHOTO BY VERNON ROBISON/Moapa Valley Progress.

After four full days of chaos and closure, Interstate 15 was reopened on Friday afternoon at about 4:30 p.m. Contractor Las Vegas Paving, under the direction of the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT), accomplished this monumental feat under extremely difficult conditions and on a whirlwind schedule.
“Rebuilding and repaving two miles of interstate in just four days has been nothing short of amazing,” commented NDOT Director Rudy Malfabon in a statement released on Friday. “We’re pleased to say that I-15 is now back open for travel.”

Las Vegas Paving project manager Jared Wagstaff said that all the photos that were taken of the I-15 devastation don’t remotely do justice to the scene of destruction that he and his crew saw upon their arrival at the scene early on Tuesday morning after the flood.
“We were all a little shell-shocked that morning as we got on site and looked around,” Wagstaff said. “It was hard to imagine what we were seeing and it took a while to get our heads around it.”
The company has been working over the past several weeks in that same location to repave the interstate. The day before, the site had been a relatively well-ordered construction zone.

But now Wagstaff said he was returning to a complete disaster area. There were cars strewn about, buried to their hoods in mud. There was debris and mud everywhere. There were huge chunks of the roadway just missing, washed downstream. And where there was once a highway median with a neatly cut V-channel, there was now a deep gorge dug by the flood water 12-15 feet deep in some places, Wagstaff said.
“We took a few minutes to internalize what we were seeing,” Wagstaff said. “Then we got to work making plans and prioritizing the long list of things that needed to be done.”

Flood waters dug a canyon along the Interstate 15 closing lanes in both direction for more than four days. PHOTO COURTESY OF OVERTON POWER DISTRICT.
Flood waters dug a canyon along the Interstate 15 closing lanes in both direction for more than four days. PHOTO COURTESY OF OVERTON POWER DISTRICT.

They determined quickly that the northbound side was in much better shape than the southbound side. So they decided to focus attention northbound to get a lane in each direction moving as quickly as possible.
Within about an hour, the equipment was already rolling. A ceaseless armada of dump trucks was soon rolling through the area bringing thousands of tons of material to backfill the deep median ravine. The material came from a Las Vegas Paving-owned quarry near Apex.
“Of course, we found that the ground was saturated,” Wagstaff said. “It was not very stable. Normally we would wait until it had dried out to do anything with it. But we didn’t have time to wait. So we brought in some heavy material and rolled it in so that it would stabilize the base.”

Before they were done, they had brought in nearly 25,000 tons of material to the site, Wagstaff said. With an individual truck carrying around 40 tons of material, that amounts to over 625 truckloads delivered within the 3-4 day period.
The project took a tremendous workforce. The site was working in full gear 24 hours per day with around 70 people on site at any given time. Workers were taking 12 hour shifts starting at 6:00 a.m. and running until 6:00 p.m. Another shift would then come in and work through the night.

It took a great deal of coordination and skill to navigate the logistics of that much activity in such a small space, Wagstaff said.
“A two mile stretch of road really isn’t that much space with all the equipment we had running,” Wagstaff said. “It was actually a fairly tight confined space. We had to keep things running fairly efficiently to maintain it.”
Though the interstate was partially reopened on Friday afternoon the project was far from over for Wagstaff and his teams. They will continue much of the same rapid pace in working to get the southbound lanes up and open again as well, Wagstaff said.

The southbound side is expected to require 2-3 times more material brought in than the northbound side needed. That is expected to take until around September 22 before both sides of the highway are up and running again.
Wagstaff said that few other companies could have done what was done on that project in four days.
“We had the quarry with the material we needed close by and we had equipment ready to go,” Wagstaff said. “NDOT asked us to go to work and that’s what we did.”

Wagstaff added that the strength of the company is in its employees.
“A company is only as good as the individuals that work there and the quality of its people,” Wagstaff said. “I’m proud of our people. In this case, they understood the vital importance of the project to the community, the region, the state and even the entire western United States. After all, it is a huge thoroughfare for commerce. Our crews recognized that urgency and they worked long hours, rolled up their sleeves and met the challenge.”

 

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2 thoughts on “Moving Mountains To Re-Open I-15”

  1. Great follow up article, Vernon….If Arrowhead Service had still been there, it would have probably suffered…My brother Terry and I used to walk out to “Dead Man’s Wash” many times when we were young…We used to dump trash over a bank off the old highway (before U.S. #91) on the East side of Dead Man’s Wash…..

  2. Great follow up article, Vernon….If Arrowhead Service had still been there, it would have probably suffered…My brother Terry and I used to walk out to “Dead Man’s Wash” many times when we were young…We used to dump trash over a bank off the old highway (before U.S. #91) on the East side of Dead Man’s Wash…..

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