These two pictures show the road munching operation on I215 (aka the Belt Route) in Salt Lake City.
The backhoe on the right rips up the pavement and debris from the existing road. It drops it into the crusher in the center. Pulverized road debris poops out of the crusher. The front end loader on the right stacks the debris in piles. The result is a long pile of gravel, which they drag off. I assume they use the gravel as low grade road fill.
The process creates surprisingly little dust. I assume that they have a pumper truck that fills the crushing machine with water to spray down the dust.
This operation systematically runs along hundreds of miles of road in the road rebuilding effort.
I suspect that this process is experiencing huge cost overruns with the increase in gas prices. Since the government pays for the operation, they can just offload the unexpected expenses onto the taxpayer.
This is a very interesting operation that slowly crawls along the highway. A paving machine will follow the crusher in about a week.
The UDOT site says that the project started in May 2021 and is scheduled to be complete in Oct 2023.
