New Penn Football Road Runs Through State’s Largest-Remaining Forest

By Alan Gregory

Drive down Route 220 through the Bald Eagle valley near State College, Pa., and look at the ridge to the east.

No need to look closely. The ribbon of dirt and rock and a freshly laid roadbed contrasts sharply with the remaining forest of pines, hemlocks and oak trees. And take note of the graders and dozers scurrying hither and yon, soon to be replaced by passenger cars and tractor-trailers.

Bulldozing one of Pennsylvania’s largest remaining unbroken forests to make way for a new highway serving Penn State football fans five or six weekends each fall is bad enough.

Gov. Ed Rendell could have shut down the I-99 boondoggle with one phone call, putting the new highway in the valley where it should be – on the flat valley land below Bald Eagle Mountain. The existing two-lane highway would have sufficed as one side of the four-lane monster.

But he didn’t. Instead, PennDOT, Pennsylvania's Department of Transportation, rolled ahead with a $700 million project that included slashing a roadbed across a state game land paid for by Pennsylvania sportsmen and women.

And let us not forget former U.S. Rep. Bud Shuster’s role in the destruction of fish and wildlife habitat in Pennsylvania.

Shuster, in his zeal to have his moniker on all manner of public works projects, used his power as head of the House Transportation Committee in the 1990s to exempt I-99 from the federal environmental review process.

Killing the Bald Eagle forest, though, was only the first environmental disaster associated with the building of I-99.

A pretty little trout stream called Buffalo Run came next.

“This godforsaken road has already broken my heart,” James J. McClure of State College wrote in a letter published by the Centre Daily Times of State College.

“Am I surprised at the newest revelations about its construction? The answer is: No, I expected it.”

Those revelations?

Construction crews mucking about on Skytop Mountain near State College unearthed what the Associated Press reported were “vast quantities of a ‘wicked’ pollutant” that threatens Buffalo Run, a high-quality tributary of a fabled trout stream named Spring Creek.

Let the finger-pointing begin.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen . . . and I’ve been here 27 years,” Gary Byron of the state Department of Environmental Protection said. “The bottom line is, PennDOT’s environmental-impact work for I-99 missed this geologic formation.”

Workers dug up between 500,000 and 1 million cubic yards of acid-bearing rock that nature had safely sealed away in geologic formations.
Acid rock, when exposed to weather, yields acid stormwater – water that, in this case, began draining into Buffalo Run.

The $700 million price tag for I-99 escalated. There may never be a true financial accounting.
But of this we are certain, nature took it on the chin.

And PennDOT is scrambling to find a permanent fix. The temporary Band-Aid was to neutralize the discharge with 10,000 pounds of soda-ash briquettes.

The Fish and Boat Commission folks produced data showing a decrease in the aquatic health of Buffalo Run.

Then word leaked from a PennDOT consultant’s office that DEP supposedly knew all along about the potential for acid drainage.

“They knew that rock was there; they just didn’t fully grasp the implications,” an I-99 critic noted.
“It was the DEP that recommended interleaving the rock with limestone and using it for fill right across Buffalo Run. This fiasco is an indictment of our entire system of environmental protection in the Commonwealth.”

Mark Henry of State College, a hunter, conservationist and long-time opponent of putting I-99 on the mountainside, was so mad that he was barely able to pick up a newspaper for days on end.

“It’s hard to believe how PennDOT and DEP and the consultants have screwed this whole project up – and we are going to have to live with and pay for their screw ups. And nothing will be done about it. Some of these people should be in prison.

“Anyway, it is unclear exactly what DEP knew and what they didn’t know. It would take a thorough investigation to find out and then I’m not sure what good it would do. The bureaucrats would hide what they could and blame someone else for what they couldn’t and the politicians would blame past administrations and no one would be held accountable,” Henry said.

Lisa Diefenbach of Bellefonte, the county seat of Centre County where Penn State's main campus sits, was more polite in her letter to the editor, pointing out the obvious.

“The ridge route for I-99 has eliminated miles of contiguous forest and destroyed countless spring seeps,” Diefenbach wrote.

“In a winter like this, the mitigation puddles (PennDOT) created along U.S. Route 220 do not serve the same purpose. Spring seeps are critical habitats for turkeys and other wildlife when we have icy, crusted snow on the ground," she wrote in her 2004 missive.

“Those critical habitats are forever gone and now may be replaced by acid drainage,” Diefenbach wrote.

In the end, what it all comes down to is this: Another piece of our fish and wildlife heritage was lost.

And whatever becomes of the I-99 debacle, another debacle like it is sure to follow.

What’s next? James McClure asks.

“We will continue building this ‘center city (State College),’ following the Los Angeles plan and acting as though we don’t know about the problems of poisoned air and poisoned water and the imminent end of easy oil and cheap gasoline – now only 40 or so years away,” he wrote.

In the meantime, local boosters across the state continue pushing for this highway project and that highway project.

And the death of our natural heritage will roll on in the naïve belief that “mitigation” can take care of all the ills.

Who speaks for fish and wildlife?

Alan Gregory writes from Hazleton, Pa., where he speaks for fish and wildlife and writes columns for the local daily newspaper.