Mon-Fayette Expressway passes another milestone

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Mon-Fayette Expressway passes another milestone

Friday, May 04, 2001

By Joe Grata, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Seeing is believing on the Mon-Fayette Expressway, supporters of the $2 billion, Pittsburgh-to-West Virginia project say.

So the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission took members of the media and local elected officials on a tour yesterday of four miles of the toll road that will open a week from today, and 13 miles that are scheduled to open in 10 months. Completion of the work will bring the expressway into Allegheny County for the first time.

"Another step in what was once a pipe dream is coming true," turnpike Commissioner Jim Dodaro of White Oak said of the single most expensive public works project in Pennsylvania history and the second biggest road project under way in the United States.

"After so many years, we're finally making good progress," said state Sen. Barry Stout, D-Bentleyville, minority chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee. "We're seeing more than a highway; we're seeing our future."

Stout tossed the first quarter into a toll booth collection basket in October 1990 to open the first six miles of the expressway connecting Route 40, California and Interstate 70.

The 17-mile stretch -- the focus of yesterday's tour -- will link up with it, thereby providing 23 continuous miles of limited-access highway.

"People seeing usable sections of the highway rather than lines on a map makes it all seem real" after years of talk and planning, turnpike engineer Frank Kempf said.

Fifty-eight miles are open, under construction or in final design. Engineers and consultants are still in the draft environmental impact and preliminary design stages on the Route 51-to-Pittsburgh section, the longest (24 miles), most expensive (about $1 billion) and most complex (urban obstacles) of four sections into which officials split the the project in the early 1990s.

But the 17-mile, $410 million section between I-70 and Route 51 hasn't been a pushover.

Dozens of earth-eating machines and dump trucks so large that they aren't legal on highways are just about finished moving 35 million cubic feet of stone and dirt.

Workers have been building major dual bridges in five different locations to span valleys, streams, railroads and highways, including 2,400-foot-long bridges towering 252 feet above Route 88, making them the second highest in the state and high enough to clear the top of the Fort Pitt Bridge arch by 55 feet.

In an area where contractors excavated more dirt than they could use elsewhere, they dumped it next to a steep hillside bordering Sacred Heart Cemetery in Fallowfield, and then leveled it, extending the burial ground for use years into the future.

Seismographs were wired 250 feet deep into the ground into a tunnel to monitor movement when blasting took place for expressway excavation. Sensors were embedded in the roof of the coal mine tunnel, where underground trains haul coal from long-wall mining in Washington County to the Monongahela River, to detect damages and to protect workers operating the trains.

One contractor imported a machine from the nation's biggest highway project, the $12 billion "Big Dig" in Boston, Mass., to stabilize a small lake of "slurry" from a coal cleaning operation. "Egg beaters" on the machine combined a cement-based material with the slurry to create grout to support the expressway.

Work on steep embankments and tall bridges has taken a human toll: two construction workers were killed when the equipment they were operating tipped over.

The four-mile piece of Mon-Fayette Expressway opening next Friday will extend the expressway, signed for motorists and on maps as "Toll 43," from I-70 north to Coyle-Curtin Road. It will provide an alternate to Route 88 to Monongahela Valley Hospital, Mon Valley Country Club and Monongahela.

The toll will be 50 cents for cars and $1 for trucks. Turnpike officials aren't revealing the toll for the 17-mile stretch to Route 51, but $1.25 and $1.50 for cars, light trucks and motorcycles have been mentioned in the past.

The $410 million worth of contracts finished or under construction make up a 17-mile stretch of the expressway between I-70 in Fallowfield, Washington County, and Route 51 in Jefferson Hills.