The Washington Boulevard disaster: now we must act
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The yellowed clippings in the newspaper's Washington Boulevard file, most more than a half-century old, show how long the city has dithered in overcoming the dangers on the flood-prone road where four people died in the Aug. 19 downpour.
September 1953: "Flood Warning Lights Urged For Washington Boulevard.''
October 1955: "GOP Candidate Rips [Mayor David L.] Lawrence on Floods; [William P.] Young Charges Mayor 'Dilly-Dallying' With Lives on Washington Boulevard.''
February 1960: "Big Flood Job Planned By City; $132,000 Sewer in Boulevard Area.''
By the summer of 1960, Mayor Joseph Barr's administration was saying the problem of flooding on the lower end of the boulevard was "largely corrected.'' A 48-inch sewer on the boulevard from Frankstown Avenue down the hill to the Lincoln Avenue extension, costing only $75,000, and the opening of Negley Run Boulevard in 1955, was said to be enough.
This was nine years after a motorist had drowned in her car during a 1951 downpour on the boulevard. By 1960, the $800,000 plan to lift the lower end of the roadway was shelved because it "lacked urgency.''
Does anyone think that now?
Late 19th-century maps show that a stream once ran through that valley. Negley's Run, fed by water tumbling from the flanking hills, flowed north along the western side of what was then called River Road and emptied into the Allegheny River.
Civil engineers vanquished that natural system more than 100 years ago. Sometime around the turn of the century, the stream was encased in a massive pipe and buried underground. By 1909, a Pennsylvania Commissioner of Health report referred to 11-foot brick sewer that emptied the Negley Run basin into the river. A second pipe was added on the road's eastern side in 1911.
These pipes, though 8.5 and 9 feet in diameter, can't handle severe storms. The boulevard becomes a lagoon with Allegheny River Boulevard acting as a northern dam. The pipes fill; the water doesn't have anywhere to go.
On Thursday, I wrote of Councilman Patrick Dowd's idea of restoring the natural stream and breaking that dam. A Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority board member, Mr. Dowd suggests making Allegheny River Boulevard an overpass so the stream can pass beneath it before tumbling into the river.
First Published August 28, 2011 12:00 am
