Aug 13, 2021 3 min read

The section of Route 40 in southeastern Fayette County that has been closed for nearly two months after a landslide covered the highway is expected to reopen to traffic tonight.

Contractors are making final preparations and posting signs directing lane changes in order to allow traffic to pass through the area just west of the Yough Lake Bridge in Henry Clay Township, state Department of Transportation spokesman Jay Ofsanik said.

“We’re still on track to open up,” Ofsanik said Thursday.

The road has been closed since June 24, when the nearby hillside collapsed and dumped dirt, rocks and trees across both lanes of the road. Since then, crews have been working to remove the debris, stabilize the hillside and install temporary concrete barriers to protect motorists passing through the area.

While PennDOT officials and its contractors working on the project were initially hopeful the closure would be relatively short, the amount of work involved proved to be rather significant.

“This was a huge, huge slide,” Ofsanik said. “We have a lot of slides in the area because of the terrain in Southwestern Pennsylvania, but this is probably the biggest one we’ve had (in recent years) and the most challenging one. We wanted to make sure when we opened it up, it was safe to do so.”

Traffic will be shifted slightly onto the berm on the westbound side of the road, Ofsanik said, giving crews room to continue working to install a 15-foot rock barrier on the eastbound side to stabilize the hillside. Crews will begin that work Monday and there may be single-lane closures at times with flaggers directing traffic through the area. The total cost of the project is still not known since there is more work to be done.

But the reopening comes just in time as many area businesses suffered a sales slump during what should have been their busy summer season as boaters and tourists had to take a lengthy detour into Confluence to get around the road closure.

There also were concerns about people not being able to pull their boats from the lake at the nearby Jockey Hollow boat launch because it typically becomes too shallow around this time of year. But with the road reopening today and four weekends left before Labor Day, boaters should still be able to enjoy the water and then easily navigate through the area as they remove their watercraft from the lake before fall.

“We’re all very, very happy to get this moving forward and get some progress,” Ofsanik said. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re glad they’ll have access to the waterway.”