Twin Lakes Road construction begins

A long and winding process

By TOM KANE

SHOHOLA, PA - After three years of closure, Twin Lakes Road will be open on May 30.

Hurricane Ivan closed the road in September 2004, causing so much foundation damage that PennDOT had to defer repairs until it could budget the cost of reconstruction. At the time, Pike County Emergency Management Director Roger Maltby said Shohola Creek scoured out the base of the hillside supporting the Twin Lakes Road and about 50 feet of roadway disappeared south of the Knealing Road intersection.

“The entire reconstruction will cost $1,147,617,” said Karen Dussinger, PennDOT public relations coordinator.

Budget was not the only cause of delay. “There were right-of-way issues that had to be settled and they can take a very long time,” Dussinger said. “Standard delivery of projects like this can be three to five years.”

“We had to put in a strong drainage system to handle the large amount of run-off that you can encounter at such a site as this,” said PennDOT project manager and civil engineer Clint Gebert.

Beside the drainage system, the contractor, J.D. Eckman, Inc. of Atglen, PA, will build a concrete wall along a section of the road to keep water from hitting the foundation, he said.

“We don’t know yet just how firm the rocks are at a depth below the road surface,” Gebert said, but he is confident that the project will meet its time goals.

The closure of the road has caused some anxiety among township officials who feared that response time to emergencies would be greatly decreased because of the difficulty of emergency equipment to reach parts of the township. During a recent incident when a large bus was stuck at the intersection of Route 434 and Twin Lakes Road, blocking the roadway, Shohola Fire Chief Donald Wall said, “Thank God there was no emergency that night because we wouldn’t have been able to respond on time with two roads in the township blocked.”

To township officials, the May 30 opening will be very welcome.