Leaning wall at Springdale field only likely to get worse

The Allegheny Valley School Board is pondering what it will do next to halt movement of a wall at Veterans Memorial Field in Springdale.

The board heard an engineering assessment about the wall, which runs along the Lincoln Avenue side of the facility, where the varsity football team plays its home games.

Bill Braun of Senate Engineering told the board the wall continues to move, gradually leaning to the facility’s interior and away from Lincoln Avenue.

“I don’t think it’s in imminent danger of failure or anything, but I think we need to do something,” Braun said.

He said the wall appears to be nearing the end of its normal life.

School board President Larry Pollick said the field, including the wall, was constructed as a project of the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was one of the programs conceived under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the economic recovery plan aimed at lifting the country out of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Braun proposed stabilizing the wall, at least in the near term, by using at least two concrete buttresses to fortify it. He estimated the cost of that to be about $35,000.

Movement of the wall will be a continuing concern, according to Braun.

“Down the road, you might have to add more (buttresses) or build a new wall,” he said.

Board member Salvatore Conte asked Braun what the cost might be to add more buttresses later.

“It depends on the ground water, how many variables there are,” Braun said. “We are addressing the current worst area of the wall at this time.”

He said that part of the wall is in the area left of the press box as you face the field while standing on Lincoln Avenue.

Pollick said he thinks it might be prudent for the board to consider tearing out the old wall and building a new one now instead of putting it off and doing it in the future, when the costs likely would be higher.

The board took no action on the matter.