For 14 years, it was a tunnel to nowhere, essentially an $8 million, 1,000-foot-long concrete box buried quietly beneath a taxiway at Salt Lake City International Airport.
But the current $3.6 billion project to replace airport facilities “really couldn’t be built without this tunnel being in place,” Mike Williams, manager of the project, said as he showed the reopened tunnel to the news media for the first time Monday.
“It showed some amazing foresight by past leaders,” Airport Director Bill Wyatt has said about that tunnel, adding that it saved tens of millions of dollars and allowed moving around puzzle pieces to make the overall project possible at the same time that air operations continue.