Feb 10, 2016 3 min read

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation on Wednesday hosted a public display of its plans for the Interstate 70 reconstruction project in South Strabane Township.

PennDOT’s project, which calls for reconstructing a 6.4-mile section of Interstate 70 between the East Beau Street (Route 136) and Eighty Four/Route 519 interchanges, is expected to get underway this summer.

“We’re really happy to be able to bring this project to fruition and make such a necessary safety improvement for motorists both here in Pennsylvania and Washington proper, and also the whole way along Washington and Westmoreland counties and for travelers coming from the west: Ohio and West Virginia,” said Joseph Szczur, district executive of PennDOT’s District 12. “It’s an important corridor. It’s heavily traveled, and traffic’s not going to get any less.”

Szczur said approximately 60,000 to 70,000 vehicles travel along the I-70 corridor each day, and one out of four of those vehicles is a truck.

“Much like the rest of the interstate that was built in the ’50s, (the roads) are 60-plus years old and they’ve seen their useful life. They weren’t designed to handle the truck traffic and the intensive loads that come along with that every day, day in and day out, plus the weather and the freeze/thaw,” said Szczur, who called I-70 the “most structurally deficient road in the state of Pennsylvania.”

The project will include a complete reconstruction of the roads – digging up the lanes and redoing them from the ground up – and plans include widening the stretch of road between East Beau to the south junction of Interstate 79 to six lanes. It will remain a four-lane highway between the junction and Eighty Four.

Barry Lyons, PennDOT project manager for design, said the project is expected to cost about $100 million, the most expensive in District 12’s history.

The contract calls for the section between East Beau and the junction to be rebuilt with concrete. Lyons said there is an alternate in the bid for the reconstruction of the other section to be done either all concrete or all bituminous.

The project will be advertised in March and contracts are expected to be awarded in May. Construction is slated to begin in July, and the project will be completed in fall 2019.

Lyons said the project is funded with federal and state monies.

PennDOT and project consultants Gannett Fleming and Gibson Thomas Engineering provided representatives to answer any questions and concerns community members brought to their attention. The event was an open house format, and detailed construction plans were displayed on posters throughout the South Strabane Fire Station No. 2 fire hall.

A PowerPoint presentation also highlighted the construction plans and time line.

Plans include a new bridge west of the south junction, wider shoulders, extended acceleration and deceleration lanes, realignment of Wilson Road, relocation of a portion of a tributary to Little Chartiers Creek, and upgraded barriers and drainage.

They also include a right-of-way acquisition involving 44 properties.

The project is the fourth being completed on a nearly 20-mile stretch between the north junction with I-79 east to the Centerville/Monongahela interchange that is being reconstructed at Route 481, and is part of PennDOT’s modernization plan for I-70.