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Tonya Papanikolas and Paul Nelson reportingA fatal accident, a buckled freeway and an evening of lane closures created a chaotic commute along the west side I-215 belt route Wednesday night.
It all started Wednesday afternoon when a driver had car problems and stopped in a right-hand lane. Another driver was distracted, didn't see the car, and ran into the back of it, killing two of the passengers in the backseat. The driver and a passenger in the front were seriously injured.
The other vehicle also caught on fire after the crash. The driver of that vehicle was able to get out before the car burst into flames, but he was injured and taken to the hospital.
The problem with this is that after that crash had occurred, there was a huge backup of traffic waiting for the scene to be cleared.
Nile Easton, with the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), explained how pieces of concrete were torn off the road. He said, "Unfortunately, it was an incident where we had a perfect storm of things that caused this: We had a hot day, and we had stuck traffic. And that traffic, the heat from the tires, the heat from the engine, mixed in with our plastic that we basically put down to seal the cracks. That plastic started to melt, get gooey, and when speeds got back when the accident cleared, the cars that came over started ripping up the plastic we put in those cracks.
"The plastic we put in there started ripping up some of the cracked concrete as well. That's when we thought, we've just got to shut it down. We know it's going to be horrible to commuters tonight, but it's better that, better be inconvenienced than to be unsafe."
Nick Park drove along the freeway before repairs began. He said, "There's big chunks of just rock and concrete and tar that were just, people were really trying to be as careful as they could to not hit anything, but it was really dangerous and very unsafe to drive along there.
Park had been running an errand when he came upon all the debris in the road. "Every four or five feet, I'd say, was just big potholes, just big dips of nothing," he said.
So what did UDOT do to repair the road? Easton said, "We are gonna come through and basically do some emergency [repairs], like a pothole patch. We are going to tear up the gooey stuff and put down some new gooey stuff that will hold much better."
For three hours, crews scraped up the goo, both with machines and by hand. After pulling it up, crews replaced it with asphalt that won't come up with the cars.
Easton says, "It will be good to drive on for a few weeks. Then we're gonna have to look in a few weeks at coming back and doing a more permanent fix here."
As we mentioned, the accident that caused all the problems on the freeway killed two people. We have learned they are 19-year-old Jasmin Gomez-Deaquino and her little brother, 14-year-old Edgar Nava Deaquino.
E-mail: tpapanikolas@ksl.com
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
