Stream bank stabilization work closes Westmoreland Heritage Trail near Trafford

It’s been a fairly dry summer in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Yet when the rain has come, it has tended to come as part of heavy storms dumping a lot of water all at once.

Every time it has done so, Westmoreland Heritage Trail volunteers including Doug Webster would worry about the bridge carrying the trail over Turtle Creek, about a mile from the Saunders Station trailhead.

“The floods that come through the last few years have been eroding the abutment on the Trafford side of the bridge,” said Webster, who was part of a group overseeing stream bank stabilization work which began Monday and necessitated the closure of a section at the trail’s western terminus for the next few days.

From roughly the 20-mile marker to the Forbes Road trailhead in Trafford, the trail will be closed briefly this week as crews beef up the shoreline with large logs connected by construction rebar and 100 pound chunks of riprap stone behind that.

From the opposite shoreline, the eroded banks can be seen clearly. That area is being filled in with stone.

“We’re helping to preserve Turtle Creek and also preserve the Heritage Trail,” said Rob Cronauer, watershed program manager with the Westmoreland Conservation District, which is partnering with the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. “We’re making sure the trail stays here and that Turtle Creek stays within its banks.”

The stabilization work — and the logs in particular — also help provide habitat for fish and other aquatic life.

“This is a stocked trout water by the state, so we also wanted to provide for trout habitat,” Cronauer said.

Working with a nearly $35,000 Growing Greener grant from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, the work is taking place along roughly 200 feet of shoreline.

National Weather Service meteorologist Rich Redmond said summer in this region can bring dry periods followed by heavy rain, the right conditions for the type of erosion Cronauer, Webster and others are addressing.

“If you look at official records going back to June, we were pretty close to normal for rainfall,” Redmond said. “But if you dig deeper into those numbers, most of that rain fell on three days. … That’s generally how it works in the summertime.”

Not only is rainfall more infrequent, but it can linger.

“When I was a kid, it was rare for the dew point around here to be above 70 in the summertime,” Redmond said. “These days, it’s a lot more common. You’re injecting a lot more moisture into the atmosphere, and now when we have thunderstorms, they’re much better at producing heavy rainfall.”

Storms with the ability to dump 2 to 3 inches of rain are more common, Richmond said, and with fewer cold fronts to push them out of the area, they can stick around and continue soaking isolated locations.

“We’ll have similar conditions this week for five, maybe six days in a row, where if storms develop, they can stay around and keep raining in the same area,” he said.

Webster said Monday that work crews are making progress on the Turtle Creek stabilization and are hoping to be finished by Wednesday or Thursday.

“From a trail perspective, we’re very happy,” he said. “Every time another storm would come through, we’d get a little more concerned about the state of the abutment.”