| Salt Lake City |
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| GER |
12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
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| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
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| NOR |
11 |
7 |
6 |
24 |
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| CAN |
6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
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| RUS |
6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
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| AUT |
2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
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| ITA |
4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
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| FRA |
4 |
5 |
2 |
11 |
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| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
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| NED |
3 |
5 |
0 |
8 |
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Life to return to normal for Utahns after Games
By Dennis Romboy
Deseret News staff writer
Life as you knew it before the Olympic block party took over Salt Lake City will return over the next few days.
Chain-link fences, concrete barriers and orange cones that have held downtown streets hostage for nearly all of February will come down after closing ceremonies Sunday night. But the liberation won't happen all at once.
"People shouldn't expect everything to disappear on Monday the 25th," said Michael Huerta, Salt Lake Organizing Committee director of transportation information.
Many major roadblocks will be removed as soon as Olympic events end, though some could linger into March. Also, others will return for the Paralympics, March 7-16.
About 95 percent of downtown streets will be back to normal by Thursday, said Andrew Gemperline, SLOC director of transportation planning.
Most of the decorations adorning the streets will stay up through the Paralympics, said Bob Finley, director for SLOC's Look of the Games.
About the beginning of April, "you'll never know we were here," he said.
When the 6,000 banners and flags hanging in venues cities come down, some will be shipped to the International Olympic Committee museum; the remainder will go into a SLOC liquidation sale.
Finley said he's not really sure what will become of the 14 massive building and stadium wraps, some weighing 7,000 pounds. Pieces of them will be incorporated into a keepsake for building and venue owners, he said.
The plug on the lighted Olympic rings in the east-side foothills will be pulled after the closing ceremonies. Plans call for the top 30 feet of the Olympic caldron to become part of a fountain at Rice-Eccles Stadium, while the Olympic Medals Plaza Cauldron is headed for the museum at Utah Olympic Park.
Downtown will be ready for business traffic Monday morning, said Tim Harpst, Salt Lake City transportation director. "Basically, Sunday night we'll start taking stuff out of the streets," he said. "It shouldn't take too long."
In some areas, the work will go beyond hauling barriers off on flatbed trucks or scooping up cones.
Street where steel stakes were driven into the asphalt to secure white tents require patching up. Crews also must restore the pavement in places like 300 West where a concrete pad was poured for a light tower at the Olympic Medals Plaza.
That will take a little longer, and drivers might experience a bumpy ride for awhile.
TRAX will return to its regular time schedules Monday, though service to the Temple Square and Delta Center stations won't resume until Thursday, said Utah Transit Authority spokeswoman Marti Money. UTA needs a couple of days to clean up and conduct safety checks on South Temple, which was closed as a part of Olympic Square.
Early-morning and late-night bus routes set up to accommodate commuters on alternative work schedules will be discontinued Monday. Downtown detour routes, however, will be in place until March 4, Money said.
Olympic park-and-ride lots scattered around the valley will be closed after Sunday.
In Park City, Main Street will reopen late Tuesday or early Wednesday, said city spokesman Myles Rademan.
Crews will begin to dismantle scaffolding and tents as soon as the closing ceremonies end but the work is expected to take a couple of days. "We're just going to ease our way into it," he said.
Meantime, the trailers and tents filling the Park City Mountain Resort parking lot will come down within four days of the end of the Games. The lots should be cleared for snowboarders and skiers next weekend.
UDOT also has extensive restoration work ahead at Mountain Green, Silver Creek Junction, Utah Olympic Park, Soldier Hollow and Utah Olympic Oval where temporary park-and-ride lots were created. Trucking in topsoil, reshaping the landscape and reseeding will begin as weather permits.
"We want to make sure our seeding and vegetation actually takes hold and will flourish," Gemperline said.
Purple highway signs pointing motorists to Olympic venues also will start coming down this week, except for ones directing traffic to Paralympic venues. Workers will change the logos on those.
UDOT plans to store the signs and repaint them for future use.
E-MAIL: romboy@desnews.com
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February 23, 2002
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