Fiery freeway crash rekindles dispute over freeway wall

HOLLADAY — Neighbors here don't have to imagine the devastation an out-of-control vehicle could cause as they look upon the blackened hill that separates the I-215 belt from their homes.

Last week, the hill was on fire after the explosion of a semitrailer, with flames rushing toward their houses.

They say the scarred land near their homes is physical evidence of the need for a noise barrier to protect them and their properties from freeway traffic and accidents.

It's a dispute some neighbors have been having with the Utah Department of Transportation for the past decade.

"If you get a time when everybody's gone, it would have gone right up," said Mel Tabor, who was not home during the fiery explosion and is grateful to neighbors who doused flames with garden hoses before firefighters arrived. "Or if someone flips a cigarette out of a vehicle, it would come right up."

Tabor's house is among a handful on Oles Lane, a secluded street near 6300 South and 2625 East. It's mostly quiet, except for the swishes of passing cars and vrooms of accelerating trucks on the freeway below.

On Aug. 18, flames marched up the hill toward their homes after a driver on the wrong side of the freeway crashed into a tanker, causing it to explode. The driver of the car, Donald Swensen, 71, of Sandy, died in the crash.

Part of the hill separating Oles Lane and the freeway is lined with a concrete fence, but it's a private fence paid for by a nearby resident.

Flames climbed around to the unfenced area, toward one home, melting the paint on a car. The homeowners were gone, but renters helped fight the fire, said next-door neighbor Kimi Tanner, who dashed outside to help extinguish flames.

"If (the renters) weren't home, I don't know how far it would have gotten," Tanner said. "My kids saw the smoke and warned me. I was in the shower."

Residents on Oles Lane and in other neighborhoods in south Holladay near the freeway have signed petitions, calling for construction of a wall between their homes and the freeway.

One petition from 2001 says neighbors felt so strongly that "a noise wall would help our situation" that 14 of 18 petitioners indicated "they would be willing to share in the cost of the abatement."

However, at the beginning of the decade, state revenues decreased, and the program in which the walls would have been funded ended.