MORGANTOWN — Morgantown City Manager Kim Haws said a construction project to shore up White Avenue should be completed next month.
Haws said the vertical piles that will stabilize the hillside adjacent to the roadway are in place and crews are preparing to install the horizontal lagging that will tie the reinforcements together.
The cost for utility work, design and construction of the repairs to White Avenue is $229,188.10.
The deteriorating hillside has been an issue for years. According to The Dominion Post archive, a landslide closed a portion of the road, severed sewer lines and forced the condemnation of two homes in 2002.
More recently, Morgantown Communications Director Andrew Stacy explained, a slide first closed the road in February of 2018. The city closed it to through traffic again in March of 2019.
While the work will soon be finished, Haws said the road itself won’t be surfaced until next year.
“It will be left unpaved for a while, for approximately a year, to allow it to settle. It will be left as packed gravel. It will resemble a dirt road, but will allow travel,” Haws told Morgantown City Council. “But it will not be paved until 2022.”
Along those same lines, Haws explained that the city’s 2020 paving list has become its 2021 paving list.
Paving in 2020 was put on hold due to COVID-19 and the resulting budget impacts to the city.
It was previously explained that the list will address about five miles of city streets at a cost of $1.8 million generated by the city’s weekly user fee. Those numbers included White Avenue.
The paving plan includes all or part of the following streets: Cobun Avenue, Dayton Avenue, Eastern Avenue, Fenwick Street, Greendale Street, Madigan Avenue, Maple Avenue, McLane Avenue, Oakland Street, Park Street, Prairie Avenue, Prospect Street, South Hills Drive, Wilson Avenue and Woodland Drive.
Lastly, the city of Morgantown placed permanent stop signs at the intersection of Darst Street and Richwood Avenue on Thursday, replacing the traffic signals that previously controlled the intersection.
Those signals came down last fall after an accident at the intersection damaged one of the poles supporting them.
Stacy said replacing the 50-60 year old lights would have cost $250,000, so the city’s engineering office conducted a traffic study to determine if new signals were needed.
“The study determined that the amount of traffic at this intersection didn’t meet the criteria for a stop light as defined by the Federal Highways Administration, so the intersection is now a four way stop,” Stacy said, adding that signals could return to the intersection if future standards or data indicate the need.
