Steep drop-off looms at crumbling wall off Ruchsville Road

Q: On southbound Ruchsville Road south of Church Street in Whitehall, we pass a large quarry on the right-hand side of the road. The quarry comes right up to the very edge of the road, which is deteriorating to the point where the supports for two sections of guard rail are being undermined. It's very dangerous to have a steep drop-off to a quarry far below so close to a deteriorating road. Judging by surveyor's stakes with pink ribbons marking what could be a new path of the road to the left, away from the quarry, we were wondering if PennDOT plans to move the road. If not, it should be stabilized and repaired.

Kenneth Peters, Whitehall Township

A: I don't even want to guess how long the trip would be if I drove my tiny car through the guide rail and plummeted to the quarry, or into a portion of Ranger Lake, far below.

The guide rail is there, for now. But as you can see in today's photo, a 2-foot-thick stone wall that had been behind it has broken into pieces and descended a few feet down the embankment. Anchored to the top of that crumbling wall are strands of thick steel cable that probably once prevented wayward vehicles from taking the plunge, before the guard rail was added.

That was my presumption, anyway, before I got PennDOT officials to investigate.

PennDOT engineer Al Picca wasn't quite sure of the wall's intended function either, at least, not by viewing my photographs.

"It piques my curiosity," Picca said after checking the pictures. "What's it supporting? What was its purpose? Just looking at the photo, I didn't see any kind of distress in the roadway rutting, cracks in the surface."

My assumption that it serves, or previously served, as a retaining wall for the road wasn't necessarily correct, Picca said. He speculated that the wall might have been installed by someone other than PennDOT, depending on how far the public right of way extends from the road's edge.

After visiting the site to investigate, PennDOT engineers "confirmed the wall has failed," spokesman Ron Young wrote in an email. This didn't exactly qualify as breaking news; the large chunk missing from between the two sections in the photo has tumbled far enough down the bank that it's not visible in the photo.

Though the wall initially may have been built to stabilize the road, the road itself remains in pretty good shape, said PennDOT engineer Kerri Cutright, who visited the site this week. There's no threat to safety, she said. "There's no undermining of the sub-grade" or other indications of major problems, Cutright said.

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Steep drop-off looms at crumbling wall off Ruchsville Road