RIGHT ON SCHEDULE
Route 30 work proceeds — as long as bedrock can be located
Reconstruction of the collapsed segment of Route 30 in East Pittsburgh is on schedule to reopen the road at the end of June, officials said Monday afternoon.
The main question is how quickly workers can drill the anchors for the retaining wall: “We don’t know yet where the bedrock is,” Cheryl Moon-Sirianni, District 11 executive with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said at a news conference on site.
The anchors need to be drilled at least 15 feet into the bedrock, she said.
The highway, which usually carries 25,000 to 30,000 vehicles daily, collapsed April 7, causing a landslide behind Electric Avenue below. About 300 feet of three lanes gave out, causing a cascade of debris that displaced 31 people and destroyed two apartment buildings and a house. The collapse occurred between the westbound exit to East Pittsburgh and the Westinghouse Bridge.
Ms. Moon-Sirianni estimated the cost of the collapse, including housing the displaced residents, would be $10 million to $12 million, above the initial projection of $5 million to $7 million. PennDOT and Allegheny County are seeking funding from the federal Department of Transportation and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency.
PennDOT awarded a $6.54 million contract to Golden Triangle Construction of Imperial on April 20, with a goal of rebuilding the stretch of highway with a 400-footlong, 20-foot-tall retaining wall by the end of June.
The extra 100 feet of retaining wall is to protect remaining buildings at the bottom of the hill, said Chuck Niederriter, chief operations officer of Golden Triangle. That segment of the road did not collapse and has no landslide risk, so the road can be reopened before that non-essential segment is built.
Officials emphasized how fast the reconstruction process has been. County Executive Rich Fitzgerald praised “the fast-tracking of this, and not just allowing it to take the normal time that normally happens on a construction project, knowing the critical nature of this artery for folks in the eastern suburbs.”
Hall Industries of Ellwood City shut down all other production to fabricate the steel piles that form the skeleton of the retaining wall. They were then sent to a company in Columbus, Ohio, to be galvanized, and 38 of the 58 piles had been drilled into place at the time of the news conference.
“Normally, you would never get these materials done in this amount of time,” Ms. Moon-Sirianni said.
The contractors were in the process of filling behind a temporary wooden wall with rocks, so that they can drill the anchors through the fill to the bedrock by the end of the week. At the same time, they will replace the wooden walls with precast concrete panels. Once those two steps are done, they will fill with more rocks to nearly the top of the wall, give the artificial hillside a decorative cover, and finish by rebuilding the road, Mr. Niederriter explained.
Officials have blamed record rainfall for the collapse, citing lower-quality fill used when the highway was built in the 1930s that didn’t provide proper drainage. Ms. Moon-Sirianni said setting up drainage was the other potential source of delay.
Continued heavy rain in the last week has not caused the contractors problems, however, Mr. Niederriter said.
The highway had been buckling and shifting for a month when it collapsed, giving officials time to evacuate residents and close the road before it gave out. Displaced residents are being put up in hotels by the state, or staying with relatives. Residents cannot yet return, Ms. Moon-Sirianni said, due to the ongoing construction and the cut-off utilities.