Emergency Road Repairs Stalled for Months as National Park Service Reviews Project

Pennsylvania state road damaged near Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area by December rock slide still closed.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Rosemary Brown stands at the start of a long road closure in Monroe County. July, 2023. (Courtesy Sen. Brown office)

Brian McCartney lives and works in Pennsylvania, but his drive between the two takes him through New Jersey. The trip from Mr. McCartney’s home to his automotive repair shop used to be a simple jaunt up Route 611, from one town to another, along the Pennsylvania side of the scenic Delaware River in the Pocono Mountains.

But after a December rockslide caused a Route 611 road closure, McCartney’s daily detour to work has him crossing a bridge into New Jersey, driving a distance to another bridge, paying a toll, and returning to Pennsylvania. It’s the same thing in reverse on the way back home, two bridges, one toll, driving into New Jersey, then back to Pennsylvania.

“It’s $2.50 a day with EZPass. That’s not the biggest issue,” Mr. McCartney told The Epoch Times. “The road is the issue. There has been a lack of maintenance on [Route 611]. I wrote a letter in 2009 to every representative in the area and said look, if you don’t take care of this road, it’s going to be closed.” Mr. McCartney, a firefighter who has responded to crashes on the road, has written several letters about conditions on the state-owned road over the years. He was not surprised when a rockslide closed Route 611 in December.

Brian McCartney of Pennsylvania must drive through New Jersey to get to his Pennsylvania job. (Courtesy Brian McCartney)

But it has been more than seven months since it was closed, and with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) and the National Park Service (NPS) working together on the road issue, it is uncertain when it will open again.

“We’ve had rockfall several times, even before December,” Pennsylvania state Sen. Rosemary Brown said in a video this week updating the public on the project. “In December, when this happened, we got $3.5 million– the state, myself, PennDOT— for emergency funds for repairs. Again, $3.5 million. Emergency funds. It has not been used at an emergency level, at an emergency pace … PennDOT has been doing everything possible, going back and forth with this permitting process. This is going through the federal government, the National Park Service. So this permitting process has gone back and forth, it’s now seven months, which is absolutely ridiculous for us locally. I think that’s more than patient.”

Ms. Brown asked people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to call their federal lawmakers and tell them to make the road a federal priority.

Rocky Road

Delaware Water Gap Recreation Area at sunset from Mount Tammany in New Jersey. (Tetyana Ohare/Shutterstock)

The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, an NPS property, is a popular hiking and river destination drawing thousands of people to the Pocono Mountains. Some 70 miles from New York City, many in the Pocono region commute daily to work in New York or New Jersey. These super commuters and vacationers all funnel into two lanes on Interstate 80 in New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border, causing traffic to slow. The locals like to take Route 611 to cut around the mess, and if there is a crash in that stretch of interstate, traffic is diverted to 611. Except for now, while it is closed.

The bottleneck happens at one of the most beautiful points in the drive on Interstate 80 between New York and the Pocono region. Rocky cliffs tower above the Delaware River, and the road bends into the accident-prone “S curves.”

High above, the hikers on the Appalachian Trail can look down on the roads and get a glimpse of civilization before disappearing back into one of the rockiest segments of the trail.

Between the hikers and the roadway, walls of rock sometimes loosen, sending rock fragments down to the road.

Roads should be improved in that entire region, Tara Mezzanotte, founding member of the I-80 rockfall fence and safety concerns at the Delaware Water Gap Coalition, told The Epoch Times in a phone interview. There are major rock mitigation efforts on the New Jersey side, she said.

“Lives, livelihoods, and property are at immediate risk, and that is not an exaggeration,” Ms. Mezzanotte said. “It’s the fragility of the corridor. There are 50,000 travelers a day on 80. On 611, there are about 4,000 a day … We’re all one corridor, and it’s a time bomb because of the different jurisdictions. [If] we were all in one state or one county, it would be addressed.” As it stands, when one road is closed, it stresses the others.

Infrastructure in this corridor is managed by either PennDOT, the New Jersey Department of Transportation, the National Park Service, the Federal Highway Administration, some local counties, or the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission.

Delay has Two Causes

While Route 611, where the rockslide happened, belongs to PennDOT, it cuts through NPS land, and there is a question about how far from the center of the road PennDOT has a right of way. Both parties believe the right of way extends between 20-60 feet from the road center. Plans for Route 611 were drawn up in 1929, and the road was in place years before the land was acquired by the federal government through eminent domain to build a dam on the Delaware River that never came to fruition. The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area was established in 1965. The parties are sorting out the precise location of the property line, a staffer at Ms. Brown’s office told The Epoch Times. The other, more complicated issue is the NPS “compliance and permitting processes.”

“NPS continues to work with the Federal Highway Administration and PennDOT on the compliance and permitting processes to address safety issues along Route 611 as expeditiously as possible yet in a manner that does not permanently impair the Delaware Water Gap, a nationally and tribally significant feature,” Kathleen Sandt, NPS spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in a July 21 email. “As of this afternoon, NPS is still awaiting the resubmission of some documents that were revised by PennDOT after receiving our comments on the initial submission. Additionally, NPS has not yet received a Special Use Permit application. A Special Use Permit cannot be issued until the compliance process has been completed, and that cannot happen until we receive all of the required documents and the application.”

Ms. Sandt explained that NPS is required to undergo a compliance process.

“The NPS is required to do our due diligence to evaluate projects that could have an impact on park resources under the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and Section 4(f) of the US DOT Act. Other laws may also apply,” Sandt said. “These laws kick in when work is being done on federal land, when federal funds are being used—as they are in this case, or in the case of the US DOT Act, when they are in or adjacent to a National Park unit or a Wild and Scenic River like Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area and the Middle Delaware National Scenic and Recreational River that runs parallel to Route 611. During this process, we will look at what the potential impacts could be, what alternatives may exist, and at ways to avoid, minimize, or mitigate for any negative impacts to park resources. It is a standard, routine process that we also apply to our own internal projects.”

Road Unlikely to Open in 2023

Once the permit is issued, PennDOT will start the first of two phases to reopen the road. First, it will take four to seven months for PennDOT to do “scaling work.”

“That is the removal of loose rock that is in danger of falling,” PennDOT Spokesman Sean Brown told The Epoch Times in a phone conversation. “Once that’s done, we'll be able to open it up to one lane.”

Brown said the one-lane area would have a traffic light where motorists would wait for oncoming traffic to clear.

In phase two, PennDOT will work on design. That piece is pending environmental and Right-of-Way clearances. The construction phase is estimated to last an estimated six to nine months.