Officials hope to reopen Route 65 in October
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Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
Heavy equipment toiled against the estimated 300,000 cubic yards of dirt and debris that rained down across four lanes of Route 65 and adjacent railroad tracks Tuesday, re-routing the daily commute for thousands of residents and cutting a major rail link. Crews will be working around the clock in hopes of re-opening the road in October.Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Should all go as planned, a mountain of landslide debris will be completely removed from buried Ohio River Boulevard by Oct. 7 and it is possible single-lane traffic in either direction will be permitted before that, a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation official said yesterday.
Until the normally busy four-lane stretch of Route 65 is completely reopened, crews using massive earth-moving machines will work round-the-clock, seven days a week, Dan Cessna, PennDOT District 11 executive, said at a news conference at the landslide site.
"We are working feverishly to restore transportation services to this vital link northwest of Pittsburgh," Mr. Cessna said as 25 super-size bulldozers, loaders and trucks moved dirt on the roadside, on a plateau 150 feet above it and on another area 150 feet higher.
"The bottom line is it's terrible what [transportation] customers have had to go through but we're working to restore traffic as quickly as possible."
Also yesterday, the state Department of Environmental Protection suspended Kilbuck Properties' permit for its River Pointe Plaza shopping center complex, halting all construction at the former Dixmont State Hospital site until the company clears the landslide.
"Every resource right now needs to be dedicated to clearing this material and reopening the highway and railway," DEP Southwest Regional Director Kenneth Bowman said in a news release.
Mr. Cessna noted that costs associated with the cleanup are being borne by the developer, which began working at the site early last year.
The landslide began Tuesday night on land being developed into a shopping complex to be anchored by a Wal-Mart Supercenter. A new access road from Ohio River Boulevard had been cut into the abutting hillside, but was buried by the slide.
Until yesterday, the hillside continued a slow yet steady slide toward the Ohio River, but Mr. Cessna said engineers believed the sliding has abated. The key, he said, was to make certain the hillside is stabilized by moving earthen fill to relieve pressure that could cause more slides.
Crews using 25 construction vehicles were moving the material, simultaneously stabilizing the steep hillside and removing debris from the four-lane roadway and three mainline tracks of Norfolk Southern Railway. Speaking loudly to be heard over the construction vehicles, Mr. Cessna estimated that upwards of 300,000 cubic yards of debris rained down on the four-lane roadway Tuesday.
As of noon, one of Norfolk Southern's three tracks was open again -- three trains pass through the landslide site in a row, a break is taken for earth-moving activity, and then train traffic resumes.
About 70 trains a day typically travel on the line adjacent to the Ohio River. About 20 were able to use the single track during a 12-hour period yesterday, said Norfolk Southern spokesman Rudy Husband.
"It's part of the main artery between the New York metropolitan area and Chicago, one of the most important on our system," he said.
Closings, restrictions and delays have backed up scores of freight trains on the mainline and affected shipments between the Midwest and the East Coast. Rail cars containing coal, autos, lumber, chemicals and other commodities have been parked in large numbers at the railroad's operation centers in Conway and Enola, near Harrisburg, for several days. Some trains are being detoured to other Norfolk Southern routes in the corridor or using lines of other railroads.
The company had no estimate of when normal operations will resume or of its economic loss from the delays, Mr. Husband said.
Its own employees and a contractor were working to remove debris from the two covered rail lines. Norfolk Southern will seek to recover the costs of those operations from the project developer, along with the fees it has to pay CSX Corp. and the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad to borrow their rail lines.
Site owner ASC Development Inc. and Penn Development, the contractor performing the cleanup work, delivered an action plan to PennDOT yesterday morning spelling out exactly what was being done, how to deal with rainfall expected this weekend and the timetable for hillside stabilization and material removal.
"They've been more than cooperative, doing everything we've asked of them, which they should," PennDOT District 11 spokesman Jim Struzzi said of the companies. "Everyone is working toward the same goal right now, including the county, and that is to reopen the railroad mainline and Ohio River Boulevard to train and vehicular traffic as soon as possible."
Kilbuck Properties, managing the overall development of the site on behalf of Wal-Mart, issued a statement apologizing for not commenting sooner, saying it was busy helping to remediate the landslide problem.
"Our first and foremost concern is to ensure the safety and convenience of commuters, those living in surrounding communities and workers on the site," the statement said. "As a local developer, we are extremely sensitive to the inconvenience this situation has caused our neighbors and local businesses and we are grateful there were no accidents or injuries as a result of the slide.
"We hope to learn the cause of this incident and will provide updates and be available for comment, as necessary."
Kilbuck Solicitor Richard Start said township officials have drawn no conclusions about the reason for the landslide and bristled at suggestions that local officials were culpable by approving a variance to their slope standards in 2002 and 2003.
Representatives of Communities First!, a citizens group opposed to the project, have criticized supervisors for waiving the standards, based on reports from the developer's consultant, Lennon, Smith, Souleret Engineering Inc. of Coraopolis, that the steepness of the hillside posed no threat.
The firm submitted solid technical support for the project's safety, Mr. Start said, and the township's own contracted engineer, Marie Hartman of Widmer Engineering Inc., confirmed the work. Objections from Communities First! were raised in a report by landscape architect Michael Wetzel, who lacks sufficient qualifications in "geotechnical engineering," Mr. Start said.
"I believe what we are going to see in the end is that the failure that occurred up there will be unrelated to any of these engineering studies," he said. "It will be the result of something, or some set of circumstances, that could not have been predicted."
Like other state and local officials involved, Mr. Start said a thorough investigation will be needed of the landslide's cause, but that is secondary now to the cleanup work. There will be no quick decision about any new action on the township permits approving the project, but once an investigation takes place, "there could be an impact."
Communities First! and some politicians have called for permits for the project to be revoked. The citizens group's officials said they planned to keep pressuring officials to block the development.
"The thing that's frustrating is everybody's now rushing into the limelight to help us clean up, but nobody wanted to do anything to prevent it," said Mary Louise Fowkes of Emsworth, spokeswoman for the group that lost successive court battles to stop River Pointe Plaza.
Meanwhile, 22,000 vehicles a day, including local commercial traffic, have spent extra time and fuel on the official detour (I-79, Mount Nebo Road and Camp Horne Road) or on alternate routes, all of which have been more congested as a result of closing the primary Ohio River valley route to and from Pittsburgh.
State Sen. Gerald LaValle, D-Rochester, has urged PennDOT Secretary Allen Biehler to remove the developer's highway occupancy permit. The permit enables ASC to tie its shopping plaza access road into Route 65 in conjunction with some widening, building turning lanes and installing traffic signals.
"There is no question that the detours around this location have and will continue to create higher costs and additional burdens and inconveniences," he said. "Businesses along this corridor will suffer financial losses, through no fault of their own, that they will have little if any recourse to recoup."
Revoking the highway occupancy permit would likely prevent the developer from finishing the $28 million project.
First Published September 23, 2006 12:00 am
