Sewickley Heights road, closed more than a year, in need of nearly $1 million in repairs

A Sewickley Heights road that has been closed for more than a year is not going to get fixed any time soon.

Landslides in mid-April 2024 caused significant damage to Backbone Road between Little Sewickley Creek Road and Grouse Lane in Bell Acres.

It has deteriorated further since, with portions of the road, including guide rails, spilling down the hillside and onto Little Sewickley Creek, a state road.

PennDOT crews have been out at least twice since the closure to clean up the area.

“There’s really not much of a roadway left,” Sewickley Heights Borough Manager Nathan Briggs said on May 16.

“That road does not service any residents. That strictly goes through park land. It’s impacting anybody who would want to travel from Bell Acres down to Sewickley or vice versa. It’s not isolating anybody.”

A section of Little Sewickley Creek Road has been reduced to one lane due to the hillside spilling onto the road ,engulfing several road hazard signs.

There is no posted detour. However, several Bell Acres residents said they use Camp Meeting Road and Sevin Road to get around the closure.

State funding sought

Sewickley Heights officials in November submitted an application for about $990,000 through the state Department of Community & Economic Development’s Local Share Account.

No borough match is required.

Bell Acres officials, as well as state Rep. Valerie Gaydos, R-Sewickley, and state Sen. Devlin Robinson, R-Bridgeville, both submitted letters of support for the grant application.

Bell Acres Borough Secretary Jill Palko said there is little more the borough can do other than the grant application support letter, citing that the damaged road section is completely in Sewickley Heights.

It’s unclear when the state would respond to the request.

Briggs said any repairs are reliant upon grant funding as the borough doesn’t have any money available, and there have been no formal repair talks with the neighboring community.

“We’ve not approached Bell Acres with a request, and they’ve not approached us with an offer,” Briggs said. “(The grant application) is the first effort to see if we can obtain some funding to rebuild that road to connect the communities.

“It’s just a huge expenditure that obviously we weren’t planning for. We want to work through the options that we have in front of us.”

The nearly $1 million repair figure came after geotechnical work by Pennsylvania Soil & Rock as well as analysis from GSI engineering.

Proposed repair work included slope stabilization, guide rail replacement and road repaving.

“It moved for quite a while,” Briggs said about the roadway. “The initial closure was because it was still moving, and after about two months, it kind of settled into its current state.”

The borough manager anticipates more debris removal to occur along Little Sewickley Creek Road in the coming weeks to fully reopen the state road.

Speed of government

Gaydos, who visited Backbone Road on Feb. 21, said a response to the borough’s grant application may not come until late summer or early fall.

She confirmed on May 20 that increases to infrastructure and transportation spending were being discussed in the House as part of the coming state budget.

It’s unclear how much more money would be available for road repairs like the one in Sewickley Heights.

Gaydos said it was important for her to visit the site.

“The enormity of them are really hard to see in photographs,” she said about the landslides. “You really have to come out.”

She encouraged area residents to be patient.

“You can’t fix them or clear them until they stop sliding — and then we have new rainstorms that kind of change the whole timeline,” Gaydos said. “I know people get really frustrated, but we don’t control the earth. They have to finish moving so that we know that they’re stable and then we can start clearing stuff off the road. That’s the challenge of that in terms of funding these things.

“The second challenge is we live in a landslide-prone area just because of our geology. We all have the memory in our mind of when the Walmart site in Kilbuck came down. That’s just the nature of our geology here out west. We’ve had a number of landslides in Sewickley and in Osborne. These are important to get fixed because these are the ways people travel to and from work.”

There was a landslide in the township at a proposed Walmart on Sept. 19, 2006, which dumped 500,000 cubic yards of dirt and rocks onto busy Route 65 and adjacent railroad tracks. It took several years to get the hillside stabilized.

Gov. Josh Shapiro is requesting $51.5 billion for the 2025-2026 fiscal year beginning July 1.

According to an Associated Press report, Shapiro’s spending request would increase total authorized spending by 9% through the state’s main bank account, or about $3.8 billion, including a $230 million supplemental request for the current year’s spending.

Gaydos said she does not believe the budget would impact Sewickley Heights’ grant application, and hopes the spending plan gets approved next month.

Bell Acres residents John Otts and Darwin King said they have both reached out to Robinson and Gaydos’ offices to push for a state budget line item for Backbone Road.

“If you’re going to go down to (Sewickley) Village this was the way to go,” Otts said May 20. “Now (there are) big detours.”

Ott’s daughter, Julia, a fifth-grader at Edgeworth Elementary, is among several students that have a longer commute on a different bus as a result of the closure.

She said her bus before the closure would use Backbone Road and take about half an hour to and from school.

The bus she has taken since is a larger one with more students and stops, and takes more than 40 minutes.

Ott said he fears the road will get worse and the repair costs will increase as time goes on.

“Sewickley Heights is never going to fix this road with their money,” Ott said.

King encouraged more residents to reach out to their state legislators and have their voices heard.

“Getting the community involved is important,” King said. “The more voices that talk about it does nothing but help. We’ve both told the neighbors and we have friends on other streets in the area that use (Backbone). … A road like this is more critical than people think.”

Related state program pushes

Gaydos and state Rep. Emily Kinkead, D-Brighton Heights, have been working on a landslide insurance fund bill.

The bill would create an insurance program through the state to cover landslides, slope movement and sinkholes and provide assistance to local governments that wish to mitigate the risk of landslides within their communities.

The bill made it out of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee in June 2024.

Gaydos said it went as far as a second consideration on the House floor last year, but they ran out of time to get it voted on before the end of the legislative session.

Gaydos said she hopes to have it up for a vote sometime this year.

Damage due to landslides is not covered under homeowner’s insurance in the state.