Mt. Lebanon making flood-related repairs
The evening of June 20, Dan Deiseroth was traveling on Bower Hill Road in Mt. Lebanon.
“When I saw how much it was raining,” he recalled. “I was very nervous for a lot of people.”
As president of Gateway Engineers, which for decades has taken a major role in developing storm-water management throughout suburban Pittsburgh, Deiseroth certainly knew what was coming when 2.5 inches of precipitation in the span of an hour drenched parts of the South Hills.
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One of the results for Mt. Lebanon, where he lives – his home experienced flooding – and serves as municipal engineer, is more than $103,000 in emergency repairs to a portion of Cedar Boulevard and at the Department of Public Works facility.
At their July 10 meeting, Mt. Lebanon commissioners voted to confirm the appropriations, some of which could be reimbursed eventually. During the discussion session that preceded the regular meeting, Deiseroth and public works director Rudy Sukal provided details related to the flooding that occurred three weeks earlier.
Cedar Boulevard, for example, had to be shut down to traffic.
“The police department recommended closure that night because of the extent of damage to the paved surface, plus part of the storm system had blown up basically down there, too, from the pressure of the water,” Sukal explained. “So that was our highest priority, to get that main thoroughfare through the municipality (open) as quickly as possible.”
He was able to reach contractor T.A. Robinson Asphalt Paving of Bridgeville the following morning, and repair work, which ended up costing $27,498, started soon after in the area of Cedar’s intersections with Salem and Greenhurst drives.
That area especially is prone to flooding, Deiseroth explained, because water mains located there drain from Washington, Bower Hill, Cochran roads.
“So that whole valley converges to that one point and eventually ends up down at the public works yard,” he said.
The public works facility is undergoing renovation, including improvements to an aging, water-carrying corrugated metal pipe with a diameter of nine feet.
“The edges had started to separate and push in a little bit. So when the force of that water came through,” Sukal told commissioners, “it folded the pipe in on itself, and we basically had only 20 percent passage through there. So the pipes that we were going to repair the joints and smooth them up with reinforced concrete and rebar were now folded in, so the repairs are no longer possible.”
In the short term, A. Liberoni Inc. of Plum Borough, the contractor for the public works project, already was on the site and conducted emergency culvert repair. The resulting change order to the municipality’s existing contract with Liberoni was $65,758.
Additional work by pipeline repair specialist National Gunite totaled $12,122.
Other significant damage mentioned by Deiseroth and Sukal occurred on brick-paved Hilf Street and Duquesne Drive.
“I haven’t really seen this in my time with the municipality, where we’ve had this kind of damage on a brick street,” Sukal said. “We’ve already done some patching on Duquesne. I think it’s safe and passable now.”
Following more patching to “buy enough time to get through the winter,” he said the eventual plan is to rebuild the streets.
Meanwhile, municipal officials continue to work with residents in attempts to rectify flooding issues.
“I think the overall goal for some of these people is to provide at least storm-water infrastructure such that they can tie into it, with some sort of piping that they may need to do own their own private property,” Deiseroth said. “I don’t think we can get in and solve every problem that’s out there.”
The municipality also is working on broader solutions in terms of infrastructure improvements and emergency response, most notably gathering data for analysis through a geographic information system.
Deiseroth commended the commission for supporting efforts in the past several years toward mitigating flooding.
“It didn’t prevent everything from happening,” he said, “but I think a lot of the projects that were done have prevented it from being bigger than it could be.”