Project to fix large sinkhole near Route 30 in Westmoreland County gets underway

UNITY, Pa. — A massive sinkhole just feet off of Route 30 in between Latrobe and Ligonier will soon be a thing of the past.

Unity Township was alerted to the massive sinkhole nearly nine years ago by the Fred Rogers family.

“It was going to cost a lot of money to actually fix, and whose responsibility was it?” asked Mike O’Barto, Unity Township supervisor.

It took a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix this sinkhole. But how exactly did it start?

Material connecting two culverts from a stream into the Loyalhanna Creek under Route 30, installed more than 80 years ago, failed.

You can see some of those rusted beams at the site, which were dug out from the sinkhole.

“It just couldn’t hold up the dirt 30 feet above it, and it just dropped down, and that’s what created that sinkhole,” said Jane Menchyk with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

Last year, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which owns the land, was able to get $300,000 in state grant funding.

“That grant is huge, because we wouldn’t be able to facilitate a project like this,” O’Barto said.

With that grant money and private funding, phase one of the nearly $720,000 project is now underway.

Crews are working to stabilize the ground in the area. They’ve also installed a large pump to divert the stream underground to a different drain into the Loyalhanna Creek.

While it was not immediately threatening Route 30, it was at the top of the township and the Conservancy’s minds, especially after the mine-related sinkhole in the township last December.,

“We felt it could take one situation, one extreme weather event, as we experienced recently, where we could see more expansion,” Menchyk said.

The second phase of the project will install new underground connectors for the stream. Then they’ll fill the area back in with dirt and put in a manhole for crews to be able to access and repair in the future.

The conservancy said traffic on Route 30 shouldn’t be impacted. A small part of Fred Rogers Drive, however, is closed.

“Hopefully, we’ll have a point where we will have no more sinkhole by end of summer, early fall.”

To learn more about the project, click here.

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