UDOT to retest slag for Legacy project

The Utah Department of Transportation said Tuesday that it will retest slag from the former Geneva Steel site that is being planned for use on the Legacy Parkway to ensure that the material is environmentally safe.

The slag will be tested by an independent, outside contractor, UDOT spokesman Nile Easton said. The test will occur before the material is used on Legacy, but no time frame for the testing has been set, he said.

"All indications are that it will meet our specifications and will be a safe product for the Legacy Parkway," Easton said.

UDOT decided to have an outside group test the slag after the Deseret Morning News reported that it will be used in about 5 percent of the road base for Legacy.

The slag contains trace amounts of aluminum, silica and lead, according to state officials. There is a very small potential for those constituents to leach into groundwater, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality.

Legacy is a 14-mile highway being built near the Great Salt Lake wetlands in Davis County. In 2001, work on the road was stopped by a judge after a lawsuit by the Sierra Club and Utahns for Better Transportation. The lawsuit raised concerns about the environmental sensitivity of the area where Legacy was being built, and asked that UDOT further study the environmental impacts of the road to animals in the area.

A settlement last year has allowed work to resume on the road.

Alan Moore, program manager with the Hazardous Waste Management section of the DEQ, said Tuesday that tests done by outside companies on the Geneva slag have shown that it is safe for use as a road base. The tests found that any constituents that might leach from the slag would be below "background levels," or what is already within the soil, he said.

DEQ does not plan to retest the slag, he said. The agency has not done any previous tests on the slag but has reviewed tests done by outside consultants for Multiserv, the company that has processed and sold the slag for about 40 years.

UDOT has previously used the slag on an intersection project in Utah County. Because of the material's light weight, slag is used to help stabilize and prevent settling in road structures, according to UDOT.

The contractors using the slag on Legacy are Ames Contractors and Ames & Wadsworth Contractors. They were given approval to use the slag by UDOT.

---

E-mail: nwarburton@desnews.com