I-70 road repairs, paving scheduled near W.Va. welcome center

WHEELING – Motorists traveling on Interstate 70 past the West Virginia Welcome Center can expect to see construction crews making repairs and repaving that section of highway near the state line with Pennsylvania in the coming weeks after longwall mining moved beyond that location a few weeks ago.
In addition to upcoming road repairs, it is likely the welcome center building will remain closed until the next panel of longwall mining passes by that location early next year, West Virginia Division of Highways Area Engineer Mike Witherow said.
While the DOH is looking at options for temporarily reopening the center in the near future, he said the facility is more likely to remain closed until the next longwall panel passes next year.
“Right now we are in a holding pattern because there is a chance the welcome center could experience effects from the next longwall panel,” Witherow said. “We’ll have another panel (move through) probably January or February.”
It was in mid-April when The Hughes Corporation of Sycamore began mitigation work on the welcome center in an effort to minimize structural damage to the building as a result of possible ground subsidence from mining being performed hundreds of feet beneath the site by the Tunnel Ridge Coal Company. Tunnel Ridge hired Hughes to perform mitigation work on the center, which included segmenting the building into the three sections.
While the welcome center continues to remain closed, the parking area and portable toilet stalls are still available for passing motorists.
In late-May, the current longwall panel encroached beneath the embankment on the eastbound side of the highway before moving beneath the welcome center in June. Witherow said the DOH hopes to finalize plans for making repairs to that section of highway and begin work in the next week or two.
“We ran a mobile LiDAR (survey technology) on the roadway in order to redesign the roadway profile to meet the 70 mph speed limit. We’re finalizing that design,” Witherow explained.
He said the DOH expects to begin making repairs along that section of highway in the next few weeks, where they will need to make some “asphalt lifts” due to ground subsidence in areas of the relief joints.
“That’s where we see a lot of movement. We do milling and so forth to keep it safe. … We’ll do a little bit deeper base repair at those locations,” Witherow said. “In order to maintain a safe corridor at 70 mph we have to build that back up somewhat. We went through our monitoring period and now we’ve collected the data and we’re finalizing the design and we should be out there real soon doing the paving work.”
He said the repairs and paving work should last a couple weeks and he is hopeful they will be able to return to two lanes in both directions in several weeks.
While he is unsure what the current numbers are in relation to the volume of traffic traveling I-70 in Ohio County, Withrow said he heard there was a significant decrease in the numbers since the COVID-19 crisis began earlier this year.
“I heard the traffic volume was down as much as 40 percent at one time … but that was a couple of months ago,” Withrow said.
Motorists encountered weeks of delays on the interstate in that general location in 2019 on two separate occasions as a result of the longwall mining operations. Witherow said the coal company is scheduled to make several more passes beneath the highway in that general area over the next few years.
“There’s a few more (coal) panels to come and it will be going on for the next couple of years,” he commented.
The Ohio County Sheriff’s Department continues to monitor traffic in that area as the speed limit is 45 mph throughout the workzone.