Allegheny Valley School District considers fortifying wall of Veterans Memorial Stadium

Allegheny Valley School District officials are considering fortifying the Lincoln Avenue wall of Veterans Memorial Stadium in Springdale.

“It’s pretty evident that the wall is continuing to move,” Matt Pitsch of Senate Engineering told the school board last week.

The large block wall of the stadium where the Springdale Junior- Senior High School Dynamos play their home football games has moved about three-quarters of an inch since 2016, he said.

Superintendent Pat Graczyk said the district hired Senate to monitor the situation after school district personnel noticed that the wall and the fencing on top of it seemed out of line.

The board decided to defer action on approving the proposal until it is reviewed by Solicitor Matthew Hoffman and Springdale officials are consulted. The borough owns the stadium property and leases it to the school district.

According to Pitsch, the wall is probably 100 years old. The Dynamo football teams have played their games at the stadium since 1940.

“The blocks are pretty big and we’re confident there is no danger of imminent collapse,” Pitsch told the board.

Pitsch and Senate had proposed to the board a design strategy that would add buttresses to the wall to halt further movement.

The cost of the design work would be $9,500. That doesn’t include the actual fix.

He said once the proposal is approved, it would likely be sometime in the spring after the final design is completed and a contractor selected when the work would begin.

“The blocks are in the range of a foot-and-a-half to two feet thick,” Pitsch said. “It’s still intact enough that I don’t think you would see any collapse by spring.”

Overall, the proposal would involve probably as many as four buttresses to support the wall at a cost of about $10,000 per buttress, he estimated.

Pitsch believes the movement seems to have been caused by “groundwater — excess water over the years from the freeze-thaw cycles.”

He said Senate would look at the water issue in doing the design work but said the wall is equipped with drains every 10 feet and the drains “appear to be functioning.”