Route 68 in Evans City has issues underneath the surface
EVANS CITY — Thousands of vehicles speed over a patch of fresh pavement along Route 68 every day, but members of the Evans City Borough Council and Water and Sewer Authority have referred to the new pavement as a “Band-Aid for a bullet hole.”
From inside the Shorin Ryu Karate Do International, located at 115 W. Main St., business owner Sean Cohen watches an almost endless stream of vehicles travel along the busy road.
The traffic makes it hard for some of his karate studio patrons to park, but there a few perks to having a business outside of such a heavily traveled road.
“Because of the traffic, they have plenty of time to look around and see there’s a karate place here,” Cohen said with a laugh.
But the problem that lies beneath the smoothly paved surface, located along Route 68 near its intersection with Pioneer Road, has borough leaders like council president Cheri Deener-Kohan frustrated as she says the borough aims to be proactive about finding a repair to prevent the road from potentially collapsing.
“We’re trying to get this thing fixed before somebody seriously gets hurt,” she said. “There’s a lot of buses with kids that take that road.”
Work completed by Evans City borough along Route 68
Replace section of existing sanitary pipe with 140 feet of 10-inch PVC pipe along Route 68 west of Pioneer Road — $41,300
Mill and repave Route 68 to PennDOT requirements — $14,800
Concrete sidewalk replacement along Route 68 — $7,000
Sanitary sewer cured-in-place-pipe liner — $38,100
TOTAL: $101,200
As of last year, the borough has spent $101,200 on fixing the road, she said. In the most costly project, more than $41,000 was spent to replace a section of sanitary pipe along Route 68 near Pioneer Road.
But there is still a growing concern the road could sink if proper infrastructure underneath the surface is not installed.
Wanting to collect as much information as possible, she said the borough recently took drone footage underneath the road to document the situation.
“You can see all the foundation stones are gone,” Denner-Kohan said. “There’s a slab of cement, some railroad ties on the top, you’ll see a manhole, the water line … And you can hear the cars going over the road, over the piece that they patched.
“If you can hear the road that good, you know something is really wrong.”
Over 25,000 vehicles travel daily along Route 68 in Evans City, according to a 2023 road study conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation
“The issue that has really gotten under my skin is we’re trying to be proactive here,” Deener-Kohan said.
She said the borough reached out to PennDOT for assistance in fixing the state road after an investigation from Evans City Sewer and Water Authority was launched following a sewage line collapse last year. The investigation found “serious issues” with the road’s infrastructure, she said.
“We all met via ‘Microsoft Teams’ and the basic consensus from PennDOT was anything under the road is Evans City’s problem,” Deener-Kohan said of the meeting with PennDOT that followed. “PennDOT would assist as much as they could with funding opportunities, but nothing was a guarantee.”
Due to a 1945 state highway law, PennDOT was not able to provide assistance outside of fixing the surface of the road.
Brian Steffy, an assistant construction engineer with PennDOT who oversees all construction projects in Butler County, confirmed the state agency would not be able to fix issues caused from underneath the road.
“It’s a law,” Steffy said. “Inside the borough limits, the municipalities are responsible for the drainage underneath the road. Whenever we’re going through a project we try to help them out and upgrade that, but ultimately it’s on the municipality.”
Steffy also said the borough’s issue is likely from an old drainage line.
“Whenever you have drains like that or you have water line leaks that wash water out for old pipes, that’s what causes the voids underneath the road and then you have a failure,” he said.
Deener-Kohan said it could cost the borough almost “six or seven figures” to fix the underlying issues in the state route, which could require installing a brand new water and sewage line underneath the area or creating a brand new archway underneath the surface.
After a meeting with PennDOT, Denner-Kohan said she researched the history of the road and found that in two instances where it looked like PennDOT had fixed the state road for the borough.
“I found something in 1987 and 1997 where there were two times where the council called PennDOT to fix a sinkhole,” she said. “And PennDOT apparently fixed it because it doesn’t show anything on our books of where we bought materials or put in an application to open the road.”
Denner-Kohan said she presented the information to several PennDOT representatives to show there was precedent of PennDOT fixing the state road, but was told it did not matter because Evans City had adopted the road.
“When the state wants to get rid something that they really don’t want to have to fix constantly, what they basically do is send it down the adoption line whether you want it or not,” Denner-Kohan said.
Despite meeting with several consultants from PennDOT on how to prevent the road from sinking, Deener-Kohan said the borough is still not sure what needs to be done to fix the road.
“Nobody knows how to fix it,” Deener-Kohan said. “Whether we find a bigger pipe, whether we make our own archway, so it won’t collapse again, we’re just not sure how to fix it from collapsing.”
