The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation hopes to hire a contractor within the next month to stabilize the hill that slid out from under Route 30 in East Pittsburgh Saturday, damaging two apartment buildings and a house and displacing 31 people.
Speaking at a news conference Tuesday morning after taking Gov. Tom Wolf and other officials on a tour of the site, PennDOT District 11 Executive Cheryl Moon-Sirianni said crews expected to drill four holes that afternoon to test soil samples and determine the depth of bedrock on the hillside.
Engineers had been testing and monitoring the road since early March after it began buckling, but they didn’t expect the hillside behind the Electric Avenue Apartments to collapse and take a three-lanes-wide, 200- to 300-foot-long section of the highway with it.
The agency had said Monday it would take several days to test samples and several more to design the proposed mediation plans, but officials didn’t know when the hill would be stable enough to allow drilling. That occurred Monday afternoon.
“We’re hoping in a few weeks to get a contractor on board,” Ms. Moon-Sirianni said. Once the work starts, it is expected to take several months to secure the hill, rebuild the highway and reopen the major artery to the Parkway East that carries about 11,000 motorists in each direction daily.
Ms. Moon-Sirianni called the area where the road collapsed an isolated “bowl” on the hillside. Remediation work probably will cover 1½ times the width of the slide area, she said, but there is no reason to believe there should be instability in the several hundred yards of hillside on each side of the slide area.
State Transportation Secretary Leslie S. Richards stressed the road is so important that it has to reopened regardless of cost.
“There’s not a scenario where I can envision us not rebuilding this road [short of severe physical problems with the site],” she said. “We know this is a very important artery here.”
Mr. Wolf looked at the site from the remains of Route 30 on top of the hill before meeting with workers on Electric Avenue below. Crews used two excavators and a loader to pull tree debris, rocks, a wall and remnants from the two apartment building and one house that had to be demolished so far.
Another house remains standing but is uninhabitable and will be razed.
Mr. Wolf called the collapse and slide “devastating” and “scary” and marveled that there were no injuries. He and Rick Flinn, director of the state Emergency Management Agency, said the state is preparing an application to declare a series of slides across the state a federal disaster due to record rain in February, and Allegheny County also is preparing an application, said Matt Brown, the county’s chief of emergency services.
The county alone has had about 70 slides since Feb. 15 and with the East Pittsburgh slide it likely has surpassed the threshold itself to qualify for disaster relief.
Mr. Wolf said he’s not concerned that federal officials could treat the slides as separate incidents that individually wouldn’t qualify for disaster relief.
“The weather problem is the same everywhere [where slides have occurred],” the governor said.
He stressed the state will do all it can to help the displaced residents regardless of whether the incident is declared part of a federal disaster emergency.
Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said the county’s Department of Human Services continues to work with state officials to meet the needs of displaced residents, some of whom are staying with relatives while others are at two area hotels. Residents of the three remaining buildings at the Electric Avenue Apartments may be able to visit soon to get personal items, but it’s not clear when those buildings will be reopened.
“We believe at this point, with no further movement, those buildings should be OK,” Ms. Moon-Sirianni said. “But then we didn’t expect the hillside to come down, either.”
The state has posted detours for motorists and the Port Authority has rerouted seven bus routes.
As is often the case in disasters, people want to donate clothes, food, blankets and other items to the affected residents. In this case, however, the county is encouraging people to “consider making a monetary donation to the American Red Cross or the Salvation Army. It is those two agencies which are providing the immediate needs for the evacuees,” said spokeswoman Amie Downs.
The reason, she said, is a practical one. Since the victims are staying in a hotel, they are unable to take donated items “and have no place to store such donations.”
Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect the correct number of houses damaged in the landslide.
Ed Blazina: eblazina@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1470 or on Twitter @EdBlazina.
First Published: April 10, 2018, 5:10 p.m.
Updated: April 10, 2018, 5:12 p.m.