Morning Call: June 6, 2003

Northampton County has asked the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a comprehensive study of the Bushkill Creek and develop a plan to fix sinkholes that have plagued the area around Stockertown since October 2000.

The study, which must be formally requested by a government entity, would be more comprehensive than past studies and paid for by the Army Corps at no cost to the county, said Administration Director James Hickey.

The county's hope is that a comprehensive study of the problem, including a detailed remediation plan with cost estimates, will overcome the reluctance of affected groups to take responsibility for a fix, Hickey said.

"The letter [asking the corps to conduct the study] is real clear: There is no obligation once they do that for us to continue onward," Hickey said. "We can't get buy-in by everyone involved unless we know it can be remediated and at what cost."

The study also must answer the question of whether it is possible to permanently fix the sinkholes, Hickey said.

A previous study of the sinkhole problem by the corps put the cost of filling them at $500,000.

Tony Rammuni, who lives near the sinkholes and is a member of the Brookwood Group, a residents organization working to get the sinkholes fixed, said the county's letter of intent is important because it moves the process forward.

"Hopefully [the Army Corps] are going to come up with some kind of proposal that will solve the problem, or identify the problem and determine if it can be fixed for a reasonable cost," Rammuni said.

The issue of how to fix the sinkholes, in the Bushkill Creek along the border of Palmer Township, Tatamy and Stockertown, has been stalled since June 2002 because no one was willing to take ultimate responsibility for maintaining the sinkhole repairs once they're completed.

Hickey said that once the study is completed, he hopes some kind of joint-responsibility maintenance contract can be signed by the county, various townships, boroughs, state agencies and private interests involved in the sinkhole issue.

Palmer Township Supervisor Robert Lammi said he was unaware of the letter, but said a study is extremely important to fixing the sinkholes.

"My feeling is, and I have maintained this all along, that a study has to be done to determine what the real root cause of this thing is, before a lot of money is put into something that won't work," Lammi said.

Under Section 206 of the Water Resources Development Act of 1996, the county and neighboring municipalities and private entities must agree to meet a series of obligations before the Army Corps will intervene to repair the problem.

First, they must agree to pay up to 35 percent of the cost.

Other conditions include:

Providing all required land, easements, rights of way, and materials disposal areas free of charge.

Relocating all bridges, utilities, highways, sewers and other facilities.

Meeting those conditions would count toward the 35 percent share of the bill.

Other conditions are:

Maintaining and operating the project after completion, subject to negotiation among the various parties and the federal government over the costs.

Assuming responsibilities for all costs over the $5 million maximum the federal government will pay under the act.

The state, through the Department of Community and Economic Development, has committed $100,000 to the remediation project, but has declined to take responsibility for the fix.

Since the holes occurred in October 2000, they caused a bridge to collapse on the Stockertown side and displaced a family from their home on the Palmer side of Babbling Brook Road for months.

Since the Bushkill bridge collapsed, the state Department of Transportation has focused on demolishing and building a new bridge above the creek.

PennDOT Project Manager Stanley Poplawski said Thursday it may cost $800,000 to design a new bridge and $1.8 million to build one. He said those estimates could increase because the consultant whom PennDOT hired, Michael Baker Jr. Inc. of Harrisburg, is still working on a bridge design.

The plan is to start work on the bridge and complete it next year.

The sinkholes stretch from the Main Street bridge in Tatamy to the Route 191 bridge in Stockertown. The Little Bushkill's known sinkholes run upstream from the mouth of the Bushkill to the Sullivan Trail bridge in Stockertown.

Scott Kraus