BOISE, Idaho — The long-awaited I-84 expansion project is getting closer to its completion. Once that stretch of the interstate is finished, it will get thousands of vehicles through the west end of the Treasure Valley smoother and safer.
Idaho News 6 ask: has the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way the Idaho Transportation Department completes projects?
We asked Jake Melder with I.T.D. who stated, "We're doing several different things to reduce the spread of COVID-19 if it were to happen here on the construction site. We've increased the number of washing stations, we also have a lot of sanitation bottles out here that are being used to spray down often touched surfaces and to spray down cabs of equipment that are being used after they've been used by the one operator."
A quick visit to the current construction site between Karcher and Northside will display plenty of operators working late into the night, bringing in tens of thousands of cubic yard of fill and aggregate.
Melder explains, "They then compact the aggregate, it allows people to work on it, but the compaction is important because it's going to provide for the right slope, for the concrete to be placed on top of."
If everything goes as planned, that concrete will last for a very long time.
The project is expected to be completed in 2021. We can only hope by then coronavirus and traffic jams will be a thing of the past.
