Moving a mountain

View an interactive map of the route the acid rock will take from Skytop to Heilwood.

The road to Heilwood -- the 75 miles it will take to move a mountain out of Centre County -- starts at the doorsteps and driveways of everyday people and ends in a similar place, with a perilous turning point in between.

The 42,000 truckloads of Skytop Mountain -- 167 truckloads a day for almost a year -- will go in and out of four counties, pass near three colleges and surmount Pennsylvania's great geographic divide, the Allegheny Front. The crushed rocks will then be dumped to rebuild the mountain at an old mine halfway to Pittsburgh.

Along the way, at a point about two miles west of Ebensburg, lies a popular spot in the village of Revloc that's closed for winter but will be filled with children, hot dogs and fun when the state starts moving rock late this spring.

Vehicles make left-hand turns onto and off two-lane U.S. Route 422 to get to three baseball fields and three big picnic pavilions at Cambria Township Recreation Park. The spot is one of the places that give folks pause when they try to envision scores more trucks every day, seven days a week.

The two-lane highway there has long been traveled by triaxle trucks, each hauling 24 tons of bony-pile waste coal to steam- and electricity-producing plants in Cambria County's Ebensburg and Johnstown areas. The trucks already "come flying down through there," said Robert Shook, a Cambria Township supervisor.

But the concentrated addition of more trucks every day has led Shook to expect the state Department of Transportation to consider lowering the speed limit to 45 mph before the heavyweight processional begins.

"I would think that that's going to have to be looked at," he said. "You sort of put your life in your own hands when you pull out there."

When tragedy struck

Not far away, at a point where U.S. Route 219 meets Route 422 a mile west of Ebensburg, the potential for tragedy is worse. Traffic getting off Route 219 has to come to a full stop before making a left-hand turn, across oncoming traffic, to head west on 422.

Six years ago, early on a Sunday afternoon, two suburban Philadelphia teenagers and two young adults bound for spring semester registration at Indiana University of Pennsylvania were killed when their minivan pulled away from the stop sign into the path of a tractor-trailer.

"It's a bad place, a real bad intersection, and it's nothing for drivers to pull out in front of other vehicles there," Gregory Sloan, chief of the Revloc Volunteer Fire Department, said at the time.

The crash led to calls for PennDOT to build a more expensive cloverleaf interchange there to eliminate the left-hand cross turns. Instead, two small signs were put up. One advises stopped motorists to "look left-right-left before pulling out," and the other cautions through-motorists to "watch for entering vehicles."

The truck drivers from Skytop will use that interchange coming and going, seeing both signs. Last week, Shook sat down with the township's four police officers to alert them to the additional truck traffic ahead.

"We're not saying that they shouldn't travel through there, ... but I want them to obey the speed limit, too," Shook said.

"It's going to add a lot of truck traffic to this area, but ever since they took the rails out, that's what you're going to have. I guess that comes with expansion and jobs -- inconvenience."

A grandmother's opposition

Inconvenience is a mild expectation compared with some reaction the truck plan has provoked. Judy Hill, who lives near the Indiana County destination, was circulating fliers to draw a crowd to a meeting Monday at which PennDOT officials will brace for questions.

Hill, whose area will get twice as much truck traffic as U.S. Route 220 residents in Centre County, wonders why what's not good enough for Skytop-area residents is good enough for her and her offspring. She has 12 grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, and some live along the residential roads the trucks will use.

"Those kids are little and their lungs are just little," she said. "Their lungs and toys aren't going to take this."

Jim Panaro, general manager of Robindale Energy Services of Armagh, winces when he hears of such complaints. He's known all along that they were coming.

In his talks with PennDOT for two years, the truck hauling and residents' reaction to it has been the red flag in the plan to haul a million tons of acid-bearing rocks from Skytop on public roads.

"Truck traffic -- we knew going into this that would be the issue," Panaro said. "If we could airlift it here, we wouldn't have a problem."

The trucks -- running from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays and from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays -- will first head southwest from just below Port Matilda on Route 220 and Interstate 99, following the ridge-and-valley groove of Pennsylvania's landform.

When the trucks get to Duncansville, three miles south of Altoona, they'll hang a right onto U.S. Route 22, go against geography's grain and ascend the 1,500-foot-high Allegheny Front, the state's biggest obstacle to east-west transportation.

Why not use the rails?

It took the Horseshoe Curve, built in 1845, to get trains over the front (the curve was high on Adolf Hitler's 1942 hit list for America), and the Skytop truckers will parallel much of the rail line in the year ahead. They'll have daily opportunities to see the 100-car coal trains -- each car carrying 80 to 100 tons -- heading east to create heat and electricity.

But the rail sidings at the trucks' destination, the old Barnes & Tucker mine near Heilwood, are gone, taken up after the mine closed 20 years ago. PennDOT said the use of any rails would still require public-road trucking and would increase the cost of each ton shipped by $5.67 -- about $5 million more than PennDOT's pending $26 million contract with Robindale.

Gary Hoffman, PennDOT deputy secretary for highway administration, said the department's rail analysis concluded that "you just can't get there from here." Thus, the all-truck plan.

Panaro, the Robindale general manager who is a 1988 Penn State mechanical engineering graduate, said the company already runs 240 trucks a day in and around Ebensburg and Armagh.

The trucks pick up waste coal from old bony piles. The waste gets mixed with lime and is burned in nearby plants to make steam and electricity. Fly ash, the alkaline byproduct from those plants, is hauled back to reclaim the old mine fields in the Laurel Highlands.

The work, acid-bearing truckloads out and alkaline truckloads back in, eliminates the vast amounts of acid-drainage-producing waste coal little by little. Panaro, during an interview last week, pointed to a crop-producing field in nearby Cambria County.

"All this was bony pile," he said. "People lived apart from each other for 40 years but can now see each other's houses. This stream used to run blood red right here."

The Skytop cleanup plan will put 50 more trucks a day onto the roads, some of which Robindale expects to lease from Centre County contractors, such as Glenn O. Hawbaker Inc., so they can start and finish their round trips at Skytop.

The 240 trucks that Robindale now operates daily will increase to 290, but 50 that are already running will be redirected to the Robindale site near Heilwood, bringing in fly ash to mix ton for ton with the pyritic rock.

After the hauling is completed in a year's time, PennDOT has said, it will make $3.5 million in improvements to the residential roads around Heilwood.

That pledge does not impress Anita Stem, who lives along state Route 403 -- a residential road near the Indiana County end of the journey from Skytop. Stem has a son in high school, and there's no shoulder room for the school buses to pull off when they pick up and drop off students.

Future improvements are "all fine and good," Stem said, but the road's present disrepair makes it unsafe as a route for heavy trucks.

"Still, there's the safety concern that I think the whole community has -- not just me -- in getting those trucks and in and out of here."

The starting place

At the Centre County end of the road to Heilwood, residents and business operators along Route 220 seem warily hopeful that 300 or so more truck trips a day will be a short-term hardship in the year ahead toward a long-term benefit after I-99 is finished.

"I just wish it were open," said Pam Eakin, who has lived for 13 years on the narrow two-lane highway. She says the long-haul truckers "could care less" about local residents who need to get into and out of their driveways.

"They don't even stop," she said. "They could care less."

Farther down the road, Howard Alwine's daughter owns Racers Sports Bar & Restaurant in the Blair County village of Bald Eagle, where trucks come to a traffic light as they make the transition from the dangerous two-lane road to the limited-access four-lane interstate. The tires of braking trucks have carved deep ruts into the paved road.

Alwine, making repairs to the surface of the bar's parking lot the other day, said he was not bothered at all by the prospect of more trucks than usual in the year ahead.

"The more trucks, the quicker the road gets done," he said. "We've waited long enough for that road."

Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910.