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From the ITD Vault: April 1996
District 4 earns concrete construction award for Interstate 84 project

District 4 was recently honored for a job well done on Interstate 84. The Intermountain Chapter of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) announced in late February that District 4 won a 1996 Excellence in Concrete Construction Award. The reconstruction project on I-84 in Jerome County during the summer of 1994 was the winner. The project was administered at the district level by Bill Merritt, Resident Engineer.

lTD was one of only four recipients of pavement-related awards presented in ACI's Utah, Idaho, Montana, western Colorado, western Wyoming and eastern Nevada region.

During the award-winning project, crews from Concrete Placing Inc., Boise, the subcontractor in charge of the concrete work, completed the concrete paving of about eight miles of I-84, eastbound between the U.S. 93 and Idaho 50 interchanges near Twin Falls. Crews covered the old road surface with 7 inches of crushed rock, 2 inches of asphalt pavement and l2 inches of concrete pavement. The westbound lanes of I-84 in this stretch were reconstructed last summer.

Safety concerns prompted the $7.14 million reconstruction. The surface was cracked and bumpy. It did not drain water properly, which created a driving hazard for motorists.

"The resulting smoothness of the pavement was a big factor" in putting this project over the top, said Deloy Dye, Utah Department of Transportation regional construction manager and past state pavement engineer, who served as chairman of the pavement division that determined the award winner.

The I-84 project "may be the smoothest concrete pavement that has ever been placed in southcentral Idaho," Assistant District Engineer Scott Malone said.

Editor's 2015 note: "That concrete section is still going strong," said District 4 Public Information Specialist Nathan Jerke. "There was a project in 2008 to do some pavement rehabilitation to improve and restore surface friction by grinding in the grooves and repairing the pavement joints. That $1.1 million job was completed by Multiple Concrete Enterprises Inc. Otherwise there's been very little work needed in that section."