The West Hills Bridge spanning Route 422 will get fresh paint and some concrete touch-ups in 2020.
PennDOT held a public meeting last night to unveil plans for doing painting and some structural repairs to the West Hills bridge that spans Route 422 east and west in East Franklin Township.
PennDOT Project Manager David J. Layman said there will be limited work done to the surface of the bridge, and that all traffic will be able to go across the bridge as they do now.
He said the major impact will be the four lanes of Route 422 that will be reduced to one lane in each direction while they work on the bridge.
“When they work on the outside sections, traffic will be moved to the inside lanes,” Layman explained. “When the work is done on the inside section, traffic will be moved to the outside lanes.”
PennDOT Project Manager David J. Layman explains to the public the West Hills Project using four different architectural drawings at the East Franklin Municipal Building last night.
He called the work “preventative maintenance.”
“When we are done, it will look like a new structure,” he said. “There won’t be any new steel, but it will look like it. There will be minor repairs made to the pedestals, and some concrete work to the deck, but nothing that will impact the traffic on the bridge. There may be some flaggers on both sides of the bridge to allow traffic to come in and out, but it isn’t long term. We don’t anticipate the need for temporary signals. The flaggers will give more flexibility in case there is an ambulance or fire truck coming through the area. With the hospital nearby, we wanted the contractor to be able to see the traffic coming and get them through it.”
Layman said the project will begin in the spring of 2020 and should be finished by October.
“We will be inspecting the bridge again. If there are additional deficiencies we find, we will be fixing those.”
The repairs are being made through a joint partnership of PennDOT and the County.
“This is a unique bridge in that (Armstrong) County owns it. PennDOT does not own the structure.”
PennDOT is doing the design, Layman’s team is managing the project, and he said five percent ($95,000) of the total cost of $1.9 million will be paid for by the County. PennDOT will pick up the tab for the remainder through state and federal funding sources.
“We call this a very sensitive bridge. There is not a lot of ingress and egress for the hospital and businesses. It’s not a good bridge for the traveling public that could be closed at some point. It’s not a bridge that we want to let go and deteriorate to the point that we would have to replace it. Our goal is not to close this bridge but keep traffic flowing all the time.”
Layman said the exact history of the bridge is sketchy. History points to the bridge being built to accommodate the new hospital that was built in the 1970s and West Hills Industrial Park.
“From what we can gather, PennDOT had nothing to do with this when it was constructed. There was a debate between (East Franklin Township) and the County as to who actually owned it. In 1981, the bridge got hit by an over-height vehicle. At that point, a decision had to be made as to whose responsibility it was to fix it. At that time, the County took ownership of it. From that time, all the records point to the County owning it.”
“It is the only county-owned bridge in our district that spans a state route,” Layman said.