Traffic lights at Mercer Road, Route 8 knocked down again
CENTER TWP — For the second time in a few weeks, the traffic signal at Route 8 and Mercer Road was taken out by a vehicle accident.
Barbara Kubala, a clerk at the Red Apple gas station at the intersection, was working outside around the corner of the building a little after 10 a.m. on Wednesday when she heard a loud bang, which she said was a pickup truck hauling old shingles in a utility trailer smashing into a telephone pole at the intersection.
“Then I heard three pops,” Kubala said. “It sounded like gunshots.”
She came around the corner to take a look and saw the pickup truck had snapped off the utility pole. One set of traffic signals was lying in the middle of the intersection.
“(The popping sound) was either the lights hitting the road or a transformer or something else electric,” Kubala said.
She instinctively ran across Route 8 to check on the driver, who, along with his teenage son, were uninjured.
She said the trailer hit the back of the pickup and flipped over when the hitch broke, spilling used shingles onto the roadside.
The intersection, Kubala said, was also a mess. Electric lines lay all over the road.
“There was lots of debris and lights and plastic all over the place,” Kubala said.
She directed traffic coming south on Route 8 west onto the short end of Mercer Road, and another man at the bottom of the hill on Mercer Road directed traffic into the Crossfire Church parking lot so they would avoid the intersection.
Police arrived about 15 minutes later, Kubala said.
The Red Apple did not suffer a power outage in the event, but Mazzanti's Beans and Creams ice cream and coffee stand was without electricity from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Manager Ryan Mazzanti said thanks to the ice cream stand's industrial freezers, no inventory was lost.
“As long as we don't open them, we're good,” Mazzanti said.
He said the store had 32 hard flavors and four soft flavors on hand when the lights went out.
The shop opened at 2 p.m. instead of the normal 11 a.m. because of the accident, and the owner had to drive to Marburger Dairy in Forward Township to get the cream used to make the ice cream because the Marburger truck couldn't get through due to the accident.
Flaggers rerouted traffic around a 500-foot closed portion of Route 8 at the intersection.
Multiple West Penn Power crews in bucket trucks worked feverishly in the 90-degree weather to repair the pole and restring electric wires, and continued their work even after power was restored.
The signals at the intersection were taken out on June 13, when a tractor-trailer pulling an oversized load hit the lines, causing them to sag. Another tractor-trailer then hit the sagging lines and snapped them.
Kubala said the incident on Thursday could have been much worse.
“I'm just glad nobody was hurt,” she said.
