PennDOT begins pothole ‘blitz’ in Greene County
WAYNESBURG – The parade of heavy trucks rolling through Waynesburg is prompting state Department of Transportation crews to “blitz the worst spots” as they try to repair crumbling roads.
“The roads are getting damaged as fast as we can repair them,” PennDOT Greene County Maintenance Manager Jerry Simkovic said.
A crew spent Wednesday repairing and repaving a large section of Greene Street near Morgan Street that had cratered after its sandy subbase foundation collapsed from the relentless pounding of heavy trucks. Simkovic said he is pulling crews from other parts of the county to concentrate on sections of Route 21 from Waynesburg to the West Virginia state line where caravans of water tankers are traveling for the bustling Marcellus Shale industry.
“You wouldn’t believe how many of those tankers are needed to do one (hydraulic fracking) job,” Simkovic said. “The weight of those trucks has so much increased, they create cracks. These roads were not structured for this type of activity.”
Greene County Chuck Morris said he is “amazed” by the number and size of the trucks he’s seen using Route 21 in the western side of the county and has noticed it steadily increase over the past few years after a brief spike in 2008.
“I don’t think there’s much you can do about it. It’s been generally good for the county,” Morris said of the drilling industry. “It’s just the nature of the beast right now. They need equipment, and they need a lot of trucks to do what they have to do.”
He noted there are no directs routes to get across the county without going through Waynesburg, turning the main business district into a congested thoroughfare.
“There’s no other way to go. All the state roads intersect here,” Morris said. “A more populous county has more in the way of state roads.”
That trend has been steadily increasing, according to Waynesburg police Chief Rob Toth.
Toth pulled out a stack of construction applications from companies notifying the borough that trucks would be rolling through the area. The borough received at least 87 applications in April after averaging 55.3 over the previous three months.
“It’s doing a lot of damage to the town,” Toth said. “It’s frustrating and it’s constant. You can’t talk to someone because of all the noise. It’s unreal.”
He said the department is working to enforce traffic violations across Waynesburg as crashes involving commercial vehicles have increased from nine in 2010 to a record 19 last year.
Now, with the weather improving, Simkovic said they are beginning to use “hot patch” pavement to make permanent repairs rather than using the softer aggregates to make temporary repairs during the winter.
“We’ve gone into emergency mode maintenance right now,” Simkovic said.