By Laurie Merrill / ADOT Communications

This vintage photo shows construction of the final piece of Interstate 10 through a series of bridges near downtown Phoenix.

Snapped in 1989, the picture captures crews paving Central Avenue atop the Papago Freeway Tunnel, better known as the Deck Park Tunnel.

Today, the mighty half mile of I-10 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles daily under Margaret T. Hance Park next to the Burton Barr Central Library.

Finished in 1990, it was celebrated as the last piece of freeway needed to complete the I-10 in its 2,500-mile entirety between Santa Monica, California, and Jacksonville, Florida.

The photographer who captured the paving also snapped a slice of Phoenix life. The picture, looking south near Portland Street, was taken in the same year that the elder George Bush was elected president, the Berlin Wall fell and NASA launched the Galileo spacecraft.

Residents arriving after this ADOT project may not recognize Central Avenue. There have been significant additions in the ensuing years, not the least of which is the Valley Metro light-rail line.

Many of today’s buildings, however, were present in 1989. Then as now, the Westward Ho building can be seen on the west side of Central – on the southern end of the picture – towering over its shorter neighbors.

The first building on the right, once the site of the Lexington Hotel, was built in the 1970s and now houses the artsy FOUND:RE Phoenix hotel at the corner of Central and Portland.

The tunnel has become such an integral part of Phoenix that it may surprise some to learn that it’s not really a tunnel. The freeway actually travels under 19 side-by-side bridges.

Ed Green, who started working at ADOT in 1962 can recall the years leading up to the opening of the Deck Park Tunnel. Green, who is now a hazardous materials coordinator for the agency, worked on the Transportation Planning team as a planner during the tunnel’s construction – his main duty was running the traffic count program. “It was a massive project,” Green said of the overall construction. “It was very exciting to see it being built.”

In honor of its 25th birthday, we’ve focused on the Deck Park Tunnel all week but we’re not done yet. Today, we have some old (and new) photos to share with you...

First up, in the slideshow at right, are some pictures that were taken during the tunnel’s construction.

Below, you’ll see a photograph that was snapped during the tunnel’s open house and grand opening celebrations. As you can see in this slideshow, the open house, which was held in the days leading up to the Aug. 10, 1990 grand opening, was a chance for people to see inside the tunnel before it was open to vehicle traffic. The public was invited to walk, ride and visit the unopened freeway. On Aug. 10, there was the formal ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by a number of government officials.

Finally, in this slideshow, you can see what the tunnel looks like today. There are even a few behind-the-scenes shots that show off the ventilation fans, control room and the space that was meant to be an express bus lane (it never was used for that purpose and is gated off from vehicles).

By the way, if you’re interested in the tunnel’s operations, you’ll want to stay tuned … we’ve got more details coming for you in the months ahead.

Until then, you can check out all of our previous tunnel posts to learn more. You’ll also find an extensive look at the Deck Park Tunnel’s history in “The Final Mile,” a document that was published by ADOT to commemorate the completion of Interstate 10.

It’s safe to say things have changed since 1912 when the Arizona Highway Department was first established. But you don’t just have to take our word … we’ve got plenty of pictures to prove it. We combed through our archives and decided to periodically post these photos from the past in a blog series we’re calling, “From the ADOT Archives.”

Photos showing the construction of drainage tunnels.

We keep referring to the tunnel as a tunnel, but as many of you might already know, the Deck Park Tunnel isn’t technically a tunnel at all. It’s actually made up of 19 bridges that are lined up side by side, creating a tunnel effect for motorists.

But there are actual, honest-to-goodness tunnels that were dug during the project.

They’re massive and they were constructed underground to serve downtown Phoenix’s drainage needs since the new section of I-10 interrupted the storm drains that were in place. According to “The Final Mile,” a document published by ADOT to commemorate the completion of Interstate 10, crews created a drainage tunnel system measuring a length of about 6.5 miles. For 5.2 of those miles, the tunnel measures 21 feet in diameter and for 1.3 miles, the tunnel is 14 feet in diameter (we told you they’re massive!).

Ron Romley retired from ADOT in 1992, but served as ADOT’s project manager during the drainage tunnel project and oversaw the contractors who did the digging.

You better believe that digging wasn’t done with shovels (referred to as “muck sticks” by the contractors. “All those guys in the tunneling industry talk in a different language,” Romley said. “There was lot of nomenclature that I had to learn.”).

There was a machine that did the work – two of them, actually, each with a different diameter capacity. Built in Japan, the tunneling machines were disassembled and shipped to California, loaded onto trucks and brought to Arizona for reassembly.

“It came in 23 semi loads from Los Angeles,” Romley recalls. “The machine was something I’d never seen before.”

A porthole was dug so the tunneling machine could be lowered down to the correct elevation. Once it was in place, the excavation began.

Romley said there were trains running underground all the time to convey the dirt and haul it out of the tunnel. According to “The Final Mile,” the three underground trains had the hauling capability of moving five semi-truck loads of dirt (92 tons) at a time. Excavation equaled 1.5 million yards of earth. Romley said much of that excavated material was reused to make the concrete used for the final “lining” of the tunnels. Roughly 190,000 cubic yards of concrete was used to finish off the drainage tunnels, along with 35,000 pre-cast segments and about 19 million pounds of reinforcing steel, according to “The Final Mile.”

“It was quite an operation,” said Romley, who besides overseeing the construction also gave tunnel tours to the public during the construction, which you can see in the photos above. “That was the neatest project of my whole career. It was the most challenging and the most rewarding to me as an engineer."

It’s safe to say things have changed since 1912 when the Arizona Highway Department was first established. But you don’t just have to take our word … we’ve got plenty of pictures to prove it. We combed through our archives and decided to periodically post these photos from the past in a blog series we’re calling, “From the ADOT Archives.”

Do you know what you were doing 25 years ago today?

Here at ADOT, we remember exactly what happened on Aug. 10, 1990 – the grand opening of the I-10 Deck Park Tunnel.

If you lived in the Phoenix area at that time, maybe you joined us for the ceremony and ribbon cutting that marked the occasion?

It was a big day. Arizona Governor Rose Mofford was there, along with senators, government officials and several hundred others.

Actually, it was more than just one big day. Before the Aug. 10 ceremony, there was a three-day “open house” that attracted more than 100,000 people to the tunnel. During that time, the public got to walk or ride through the unopened tunnel (we hear there were even fireworks!).

Later this week, we’ll share some photos from the festivities along with some earlier pictures of the tunnel’s construction. Today, as we mark the tunnel’s 25th birthday, we hope you’ll enjoy the video above…

We’d also love to hear if you have any memories from the tunnel’s early days. Did you attend the open house or grand opening? Perhaps you were in one of the first cars to drive through the tunnel? Maybe you remember what it was like to drive on I-10 before the tunnel was complete? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter or right here in the blog comments!

By Doug Pacey
ADOT Office of Public Information

Twenty-five years ago, the last segment of Interstate 10 was completed and it happened in Phoenix.

When the Arizona Department of Transportation opened the “Final Mile” between Third Avenue and Third Street, including the Deck Park Tunnel, it created the nation’s second coast-to-coast interstate, stretching 2,460 miles and across eight states, from Santa Monica, Calif., to Jacksonville, Fla.

“This opening of I-10 is truly a milestone in transportation history,” Thomas Lane, head of the Federal Highway Administration, said at the tunnel’s dedication ceremony on Aug. 10, 1990. “Today, we mark the completion of a major transcontinental route.”

Fast-forward to 2015, on Monday, Aug. 10, when ADOT observes the Deck Park Tunnel’s 25th birthday.

While the opening of the Deck Park Tunnel marked the completion of I-10 as a transcontinental interstate, it also signaled the beginning of the Phoenix-metro area’s modern freeway system, which continues to grow today. Putting the age of the freeway network into perspective, “The Simpsons” has been on television longer than the Deck Park Tunnel has been open to traffic.

When the tunnel opened, construction of the Loop 101 and state routes 51 and 143 had just begun, and the Loop 202, Loop 303 and State Route 24 existed only on planning maps. Phoenix’s population boom made the expansion necessary. The 20th-largest city in the United States in 1970, Phoenix would rise to No. 6 by 2000, according to U.S. Census data. The completion of the Deck Park Tunnel connected the metropolitan area’s east and west valleys, allowing for quicker and more convenient travel across the metro area. The tunnel also emerged as a linchpin in Arizona’s economic development, supporting the efficient movement of goods and commerce into and through the state. Since it opened, an estimated two billion vehicles have passed through the tunnel’s tile-lined walls.

“The Deck Park Tunnel is more than simply a way to get through downtown Phoenix,” ADOT Director John Halikowski said. “It is part of an interstate Key Commerce Corridor that is integral to Arizona’s continued economic growth and development.”

Decades before it was built, transportation officials recognized the need for the Papago Freeway – the stretch of I-10 that passes through Phoenix. The first plans for the freeway were formalized in 1960. However, a tunnel wasn’t included in the original design.

The tunnel was a part of a solution to opposition that did not want the Papago Freeway built near the Phoenix city center, unsettling neighborhoods established before interstates existed. In 1969, plans called for an elevated freeway with wide, arcing “helicoil” ramps that were designed to minimize disruption of city streets and the utility grid. But a public vote to build the freeway was defeated in 1973. Two years later, the elevated freeway was scrapped in favor of a below-grade design, which included the tunnel, and Phoenix voters approved the measure. Engineers devised an innovative plan that set the freeway below street level for six blocks – from Third Avenue to Third Street. Above the freeway, 19 bridges would be lined up side by side, creating a tunnel effect for motorists, even though it does not meet the Federal Highway Administration definition of a tunnel. A 30-acre park would be built atop the bridge decks. That’s how it came to be known as the “Deck Park Tunnel,” though its official name is the Papago Freeway Tunnel.

Still, the Papago wasn’t yet a “go.” Freeway opponents put the issue on the ballot again in 1979, but citizens voted overwhelmingly in favor – 3-to-1 – of building the Papago Freeway and construction began in 1983. When it was finished in 1990, the Papago Freeway ranked as the most expensive highway project to date in Arizona at a cost of $500 million, plus $150 million for right-of-way purchases.

Not surprisingly, public interest in the freeway was high as the opening neared. According to a report in The Arizona Republic, more than 100,000 people attended a three-day “open house” at the Deck Park Tunnel, riding bikes and running footraces in yet-to-be-driven-on traffic lanes. At the dedication on Aug. 10, 1990, Federal Highway Administration official Thomas O. Willett addressed the obstacles overcome in the previous three decades to build the freeway.

“Completion of the Papago Freeway is far more than construction of concrete and steel,” Willett said. “It represents a successful culmination of a state, city and federal partnership forged by the challenge of a concerned public.”

With hundreds of blog posts in our archives, we understand if you haven’t had a chance to read them all.

However, there’s a lot of interesting content in those early posts and we don’t want you to miss out. That’s why we’re looking back and highlighting some of our favorites in a new series called, “From the Rearview Mirror.”

Originally published on Aug.18, 2011, this post explains how crews regularly clean and maintain the I-10 Deck Park Tunnel.

Cleaning, maintenance all part of I-10 tunnel upkeep

Originally published in 2011, this video shows how the Deck Park tunnel is maintained.

With roughly 240,000 vehicles driving through it each day, the I-10 Deck Park Tunnel needs the night off every once in a while for a good, thorough scrub!

Just about every four months, the tunnel is closed to traffic in order to allow crews the chance to wash the walls, maintain the ventilation systems and check on the tunnel’s 3,700 light fixtures (about 150-200 light bulbs are changed out each quarter!).

Crews typically complete the cleaning over two nights. That means only one side of the tunnel needs to be closed each night … leaving the other direction open to traffic.

Cleaning the white tile walls not only gives the tunnel a fresh look, but it also helps brighten things up a bit.

“We’re washing the walls and keeping them clean so the light bounces off the wall onto the deck so it makes a better drive through,” says ADOT Highway Operations Supervisor Ed Walsh in the video above.

A little history…
For anyone fairly new to the Valley, it might be hard to believe that the Deck Park Tunnel represents part of Interstate-10’s “final mile.”

It was 21 years ago this month that the tunnel was completed, closing up the last remaining gap in the 2,460-mile-long interstate that stretches across the country.

The project was a big one because the path of this final mile was in between two historic Phoenix neighborhoods.

Designers came up with an innovative plan to limit the impacts on the communities. Builders dug out the freeway’s path, put in the 10-lane roadway and covered up the top of the road with a deck made out of 19 side-by-side bridges, created a tunnel and then built a 30-acre city park on top. The project took more than five years to finish and cost an estimated $700 million.

If you are a Phoenix-area commuter who travels daily through the Deck Park Tunnel, you’re probably already aware that a produce truck spilled its contents yesterday afternoon as it headed westbound on I-10.

You might have heard about it, even if you don’t take that route. Rotten produce spilling all over the road isn’t something that happens everyday, so it’s only normal that this got a little more attention than your average traffic incident.

Even if we can’t predict what’s going to happen out on the roads (who could have guessed our crews would be cleaning rotten fruit salad on a Thursday evening?), ADOT is ready to deal with whatever it is, as evidenced in the video above.

With the assistance of local emergency service departments, ADOT was out there to clear the road and assess the situation. Within hours, lanes were reopened and traffic was flowing again.

Luckily, no structural damage was caused by the crash, however the shoulder will remain closed until repairs can be made.

Road maintenance is about more than just paving roads and fixing guardrail.

Hopefully, our blog has enlightened you to that fact. But we know we really haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to covering everything our crews are responsible for.

That’s why today, we’re going to share with you, 5 ADOT electrical maintenance-related tasks you may not have known about: 

1) Blue Stake requests
Blue Stake refers to the law that requires anyone doing any sort of excavation to call a statewide hotline (811) before they dig. Arizona Blue Stake, Inc. will then notify any underground facility owners (water, gas, electrical, ADOT, etc.) so they can mark the locations of their underground lines, allowing the person doing the excavating to avoid them.

ADOT has six techs in the Phoenix Maintenance District alone devoted to Blue Stake requests. These employees work with Arizona Blue Stake, Inc. by researching and then marking the location of any ADOT underground utilities that are in the way of an excavation plan.

“Our Blue Stake crew is dedicated to protecting our underground facilities,” said Joe McGuirk, ADOT’s electrical operations engineer for the Phoenix district, adding that his crew gets about 25,000-30,000 “tickets” or inquiries a year.

Everyone knows about ADOT’s bridges, roads and facilities that sit above ground, but the agency has a lot underground, too. McGuirk said there are things like conduits and fiber cable for ADOT’s Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that are underground and crucial to the operation of the state’s highway system, along with all the wires that keep the freeways lit at night.

2) Pump House Maintenance
Just in the Phoenix-metro area, there are 70 pump stations. They’re all positioned near roadways and help to keep the roads dry.

“They collect storm water,” McGuirk said. “We don’t want water on our roadway.”

ADOT crews maintain the pumps and make sure they’re ready and working properly. The crews on this team also work on regular improvement projects to make sure the pumps will work efficiently. Besides all this, the crews are on-call during rainstorms to fix anything that needs repair in order to avoid flooding.

3) I-10 Deck Park Tunnel maintenance
A crew of three works to “keep the tunnel safe and ready for traffic,” McGuirk said.

Cleaning and maintenance are among the team's regular duties, but they also maintain the tunnel’s ventilation system. The eight ventilation fans in the tunnel keep carbon monoxide at safe levels.

4) Signals and lighting
This is the ADOT Electrical Operation’s largest group. The ADOT employees on this team make sure all of ADOT’s signals and lights are in working order (that includes changing quite a few light bulbs!).

McGuirk said in the Phoenix area alone, ADOT has 164 signals (that doesn’t include ramp meters) and roughly 13,000 light bulbs to maintain.

Duties in this section include preventative maintenance and coordination with municipalities and railroads. Unfortunately, this team also has to regularly replace wire that is stolen right out of the ground.

5) Intelligent Transportation Systems
There are 200 traffic cameras in the Phoenix district, along with about 80 DMS boards, and McGuirk said he has a five-person team devoted to the care and preservation of the systems.

This includes repairs and upgrades to the DMS boards themselves and fixes to the detector stations.

“We maintain all the equipment out in the field for ADOT’s Traffic Operations Center,” he said.

There’s more… 
This is by no means a complete list of all the maintenance duties performed by ADOT crews. But, we hope it gives you a look at some of the “unseen” tasks being performed by our crews every day to help keep the state’s highway system operating smoothly.

There’s a lot more to cover on this subject – and we will, so stay tuned!

By Dani Weber
ADOT Office of Creative Services

Interstate 10 moves approximately 260,000 vehicles through the Phoenix metro area every day. It’s a vital link for commercial traffic traveling to and from California and New Mexico; for intrastate travelers going between Phoenix and Tucson; and for a respectable number of travelers going to and from many of Arizona’s southern towns and cities.

From California to New Mexico, it’s nearly 400 miles long and intersects with nearly two dozen highways or routes, including interstates 8, 17 and 19. If you wanted to discount as a statistical outlier the 881-mile stretch that runs through Texas (where everything’s just bigger anyway), Arizona could even claim to have the longest stretch of I-10. So, I-10 is arguable both huge and important, right? Well, there’s one particularly special stretch: the bit that runs through the Papago Freeway Tunnel in Phoenix.

Before we discuss how special this stretch of freeway is, we should straighten some things out:

• The Papago Freeway Tunnel is better known as the Deck Park Tunnel to Valley residents. Many residents don’t even know the tunnel has more than one name.
• It’s technically not a tunnel. The freeway actually travels through the underside of a series of 19 side-by-side bridges, which knocks it out of the FHWA definition of what makes a tunnel a tunnel. Residents call it a tunnel because, well, that’s what it feels like … and it’s a lot easier to call it that than the “Bridge Deck Park Underside.” It just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
• Also, the park above the tunnel is not called Deck Park, even colloquially. It’s called the Margaret T. Hance Park (or Hance Park for shorthand) in honor of Phoenix’s first female mayor. The “deck” in “Deck Park” refers to the fact that the park sits on the deck of the series of bridges.

To review: its official name is Papago Freeway Tunnel, but it prefers to be called the Deck Park Tunnel; it’s not actually a tunnel, but the underside of a series of bridges; and the park above the nontunnel isn’t actually named Deck Park, but rather Margaret T. Hance Park. So far it seems like the only thing special about this stretch of road is its apparent identity crisis. Is there anything about this multinomered nontunnel that we can trust?!

There is, as a matter of fact.

Commuters who travel through the tunnel every morning and evening may not realize that they’re driving across the final half-mile that completed the entire I-10 — the one that’s nearly 2,500 miles long and stretches from Santa Monica, Calif., to Jacksonville, Fla. This was the last piece of a herculean undertaking that took over 30 years to complete. No equivocation necessary on this one.

Here are a few facts you probably didn’t know about the Deck Park Tunnel:

• It has roughly 3,000 lightbulbs that ADOT crews change out three times each year.
• Four gargantuan fans are installed in each tube in case emergency ventilation is necessary.
• To keep the lights, fans and other features operational during a power outage, ADOT keeps a diesel generator fueled and ready to go.
• There’s actually a third, single-lane tube that runs between the east- and westbound tubes. This tube was meant to be an express bus lane, but it’s currently unused and gated off.
• Each tube can support 16,000 vehicles every hour.

Identity crisis notwithstanding, it turns out the Deck Park Tunnel is a respectable feat of engineering and maintenance!

Next month will mark 22 years since its completion. It’s not really a milestone, but how about we celebrate anyway? We could all hold our breath and make a wish at the same time!