Here are challenges Port Authority officials faced after a city water main broke on the early morning of Feb. 5 and flooded the Monongahela Incline station on the side of Mount Washington:
• A buckled sidewalk on Grandview Avenue that wouldn’t let them go in through the regular front door.
• Water and mud covering the street-level ticketing and waiting area of the nation’s oldest continuously operating funicular.
• One level down, more water gushing through an 18-inch-thick sandstone wall that was part of the incline’s original construction and holds key support beams in the room where wheels known as sheaves crank cables used to raise and lower the incline cars from Station Square.
• Water damage to a compressor, operating computer and other sophisticated electronic equipment to adjust the speed and insure the safety of the incline cars.
All this and no sign of the original construction plans from when the incline was built 149 years ago to guide engineers faced with developing a plan to repair the station, said Dave Matlin, the authority’s senior project engineer. Mr. Matlin led a tour of the station Friday as a crew from Michael A. Facciano Contracting began preparing the entry for new floor tiles.
Without the original plans, Mr. Matlin said the authority and engineers from consultant Gannett Fleming developed a plan to repair the facility as quickly and efficiently as possible. Although there are still some variables, the project is expected to cost about a half million dollars.
“I think [Gannett engineer Jon McHugh and I] were a little excited about it as a challenge,” Mr. Matlin said. “We just had to get a plan together pretty quickly.”
First step: ensure the stability of the wall and the two sets of steel beams it supports, one set for each side of the incline.
“Water was gushing through cracks in this wall,” Mr. Matlin said as he stood in the crowded basement that is about 25 feet square and filled with sheaves, cables and electronic equipment. “I was told it was just like a waterfall.”
Once the water was shut off, engineers scraped off a thin skim coat of cement around the wall where the beams had been placed and found substantial leaks in the sandstone underneath from missing mortar.
“Mortar was just crumbling out,” he said. “It was like sand. You touched it and it fell apart.”
In addition, engineers found the beams were resting in the wall but weren’t really anchored there. To support the beams and take pressure off the wall until it could be repaired, crews installed a temporary support system under the beams using 6-by-6-inch wooden posts.
With the posts in place, the next step was to inject mortar into the existing wall and build reinforcing walls inside that are about four feet high, 42 inches wide and six inches thick to stabilize the original wall. On Monday, crews will excavate outside in front of the original wall and sandwich it between another support wall and a steel plate, as well as installing reinforcement bars to the beams for additional support.
When that is finished, Mr. Matlin said, the wall and beams should have substantially more support than they need.
While the wall work and building repairs are progressing, the authority also has been testing and evaluating electronic and mechanical equipment as best it can without actually running the incline cars. For example, one computer that was inundated with water has been dried out and seems to be in good working order.
The rest of the system? It’s anybody’s guess.
“Visually, as best we can tell, we don’t have any damage to the wheels,” Mr. Matlin said. “We basically tested as much as we could without running the incline. We just won’t know for sure until we can run it.”
While the incline is out of service for the 600,000 passengers who use it annually, the authority also will perform some other tasks. One major item, replacing a safety cable, will be done now so the authority doesn’t have to close the incline for several days later in the year. Crews also installed a ceiling fan in the waiting area.
The authority is running shuttle buses from Mount Washington to Station Square until the incline reopens. Right now, work is on schedule to reopen in mid April, but that could change.
“When we start running it again, we don’t know what we’re going to find,” Mr. Matlin said. “That’s a bit of a wild card.”
Ed Blazina: eblazina@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1470 or on Twitter @EdBlazina.
Correction (made at 1 p.m., March 24): Dave Matlin is Port Authority’s senior project engineer. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated his title.
First Published: March 24, 2019, 12:00 p.m.
