About 77,000 cubic yards of mostly sandstone and shale are being blasted loose and removed from the cliff abutting Route 28 in Harmar as part of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's hillside stablilization project.
The rock will soon be hauled to a site near the Route 910 interchange, where old concrete slabs removed as part of highway rehabilitation in the vicinity are being dumped.
"It already looks like a small mountain," PennDOT spokesman Jim Struzzi said.
People have been calling PennDOT, asking for a piece of the rock that has menaced the stretch of Route 28 since it was finished more than three decades ago.
"They want it for landscaping, as a souvenir, whatever," Mr. Struzzi said. "There's plenty of it, that's for sure."
PennDOT doesn't legally own the rock. It belongs to the contractor cutting shelves into the hillside and creating "drop zones" to prevent falling boulders from rolling onto the highway in the future.
When somebody calls the District 11 office in Collier, PennDOT gives them the contractor's phone number.
This aside came up after a regular e-mailer, Dick Kraft, of Bethel Park, asked, "Where is all the dirt being blasted from Route 28 and excavated from the under-the-river tunnels being taken to?"
Good question.
Besides the 77,000 cubic yards being removed from the cliff along Route 28, the Port Authority is removing about 68,000 cubic yards of material for the 1.2-mile light-rail extension to the North Shore, including twin tunnels under the Allegheny River and subway stations at Gateway Center and PNC Park.
That's a total of 145,000 cubic yards of waste, or about one-and-a-half times as much as the crumbled concrete and debris removed when Three Rivers Stadium was imploded in January 2001.
On a good day, when the 500-ton mechanical grubworm is grinding away underground for the T, about 25 dump-truck loads of stone, dirt and muck are hauled to the authority's dump site -- empty land at the former LTV Steel Co. in Hazelwood.
PennDOT refers to motorists as customers. Dave Dailey, of Shaler, isn't a happy one.
"Hundreds of orange barrels have lined Route 28 between Downtown and New Kensington for years," he wrote, "but the quality of the new concrete is awful at best, especially southbound near the Cheswick Exit. Taxpayers are getting ripped off with drawn-out schedules and poor work."
PennDOT is currently spending $35.8 million to rehabilitate 7 miles of Route 28, including 17 bridges and a new lane to the Pittsburgh Mills shopping complex, plus $8.5 million to fix the rock slide problems in Harmar.
Not long ago, the Route 28/8 interchange in Etna was a project that PennDOT said required urgent attention. The work was divided into phases and almost four years were spent improving the southbound bridge and ramps. Northbound was supposed to follow after 2004 but the final two phases seem to have fallen off the radar screen.
"I need to buy stock in the orange-barrel business," Mr. Dailey wrote.
Tom Kanhofer, of Allison Park, finds it hard to believe that PennDOT will spend $11.3 million starting a week from tomorrow to repair 8 miles of the Parkway North/I-279 between the North Side and Camp Horne Road in Ohio Township.
"What? This section of road wedged into the East Street Valley is not even 18 years old!" he said. "A $550 million road already in need of extensive repairs? What kind of a Mickey Mouse company built it? What a ripoff."
PennDOT calls it "preventive maintenance." In any case, the work promises to anger many other motorists once lanes are closed on the busy highway whose last link (the "North Shore Expressway" portion) opened in 1989 after 30 years of promises, planning and political fights.
"Say it ain't so, Joe," Mr. Kanhofer e-mailed.
Sorry.
First Published: May 18, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
