Bethel Park school officials concerned about another hillside slip
About two years after a hillside slip was repaired at Bethel Park High School, school district officials are worried another hillside at nearby Independence Middle School might be showing signs of the same problem.
The district spent about $650,000 to stabilize the hill near the high school softball field. The hill started slipping in 2016.
A resident who lives near Independence Middle School told school officials another hill might be showing signs of a landslide. So, the school board agreed to spend up to $30,000 to install monitoring equipment on that hill to determine if it is stable or not.
The district’s engineer, Garvin Boward Beitko Engineering, will monitor the hillside for about a year.
If the hill does slip, it will not endanger either the middle or high schools because both buildings are far enough away from that hillside, according to Leonard Corazzi, the district’s director of finance and operations.
Work to stabilize the hill near the high school finished in Fall 2017.
The school district’s engineer said the contractors who built Bethel Park High School eight years ago used unsuitable soil and other fill to build the hill and that’s why it was unstable.