Heat causes another section of US 89 to buckle in Davis County

Carter Williams
·2 min read
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A fire danger sign shows conditions are extreme near Little Dell Reservoir on Wednesday, June 16, 2021. Utah Department of Transportation crews repair damage to U.S. 89 in Layton after a section of the highway buckled late Monday afternoon. The impacted highway lane has since reopened.
A fire danger sign shows conditions are extreme near Little Dell Reservoir on Wednesday, June 16, 2021. Utah Department of Transportation crews repair damage to U.S. 89 in Layton after a section of the highway buckled late Monday afternoon. The impacted highway lane has since reopened. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News

A section of U.S. 89 in Davis County is open again after crews repaired parts of the roadway that buckled in the heat late Monday afternoon, a day after another heat-related road-buckling incident in the same area, state transportation officials said.

Utah Department of Transportation crews received a report of the highway buckling near 3000 North in Layton shortly after 5 p.m. The damage stretched across concrete panels in one of the southbound lanes, according to UDOT spokesman John Gleason.

"With concrete panels, there's an expansion joint that separates them. That allows the panels to breathe. When it gets warmer, they expand; and when it gets colder, they contract," he explained. "Sometimes when there's grit or dirt (or) stones, they clog up those expansion joints. It doesn't leave room for the panels to expand, so they basically move in on themselves."

Crews repair this type of damage by "cutting out" the impact section and patching it up, he added. It's a process that takes a few hours to complete, as was the case on Monday.

The incident came after temperatures across the Wasatch Front climbed into the upper 90s and low 100s for the fourth straight day, which is when these types of incidents tend to happen across the region. In fact, UDOT crews were called in Sunday to repair road-buckling damage to the overpass that connects state Route 193 and southbound U.S. 89, a section just north of where Monday's incident occurred.

Heat waves caused similar road buckles on I-15 in Centerville last year and I-215 in Salt Lake County in 2021. The current seven-day forecast shows no signs of the ongoing heat stopping over the next week, so more cases could pop up in the near future, especially in areas with older pavements.

"This is the time of year — the first and second week of July — that we really start seeing these buckling situations happen on the roads," Gleason said. "There's an extended period of time where the temperatures are really high, especially if it's not cooling down much overnight. That's when we see the road damage that we've seen here a couple of times over the past week or two."

He adds that if anyone sees road damage, which looks like "crumbling pavement" by an expansion joint, should contact UDOT about it as soon as possible so crews can repair the damage. The agency's primary phone number is 801-965-4000.