Spithaler School Road in Forward Township is closed due to a washed-out berm. Barricades were placed to deter traffic. Cary Shaffer/Butler Eagle 08/09/22

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Motorists in Forward Township will need to find alternate routes when traveling near Spithaler School Road and Brownsdale Road during the next couple of weeks.

The intersection of the roads is closed due to flooding damage from Friday’s torrential rainstorm in the county.

“There's just a stretch there at several points where we’ve lost essentially the berm, and it’s a pretty big drop-off down to Glade Run,” township manager Tom Hartwig said.

The township declared an emergency at a meeting Tuesday night in order to quickly move to fix the road, Hartwig said, “before anything else happens.” Slippery Rock borough council also declared an emergency Friday night due to the storm.

“We just thought it would be the safest thing to do to close the roads,” Hartwig said. “We are hoping that if we can get started at the end of this week or early next week, after work begins, we are hoping the road will only be closed for about two weeks.”

The washout at Brownsdale and Spithaler was the main area of water damage from the storm in the township, Hartwig said.

“We have had some other drainage ditches wash out, and we dealt with tree limbs being down, but nothing out of the ordinary for bad storms like that,” he said. “We are just chipping away with the cleanup, but this is the worst of it here with this road. It could have been a lot worse if we had lost any of the paved surface, which we did not.”

Spithaler School Road in Forward Township is closed due to a washed-out berm. Barricades were placed to deter traffic. Cary Shaffer/Butler Eagle 08/09/22

No detour has been posted officially, but Hartwig recommends drivers continue down Spithaler to Ashtop and take Ashtop to Route 68, before returning to Brownsdale Road via Route 68.

The township has enough funds through the Marcellus Shale Act 13 funding to pay for repairs, Hartwig said. Final costs for the repairs, however, still present an unknown.

“We are trying to figure that out right now. We won’t know exactly until we are in there, but we feel that the cost might be somewhere on the order of $60,000 to $75,000,” Hartwig explained. “We won’t know until we are actually in there doing the work. At this point, we’re trying to firm up unit prices with a contractor, with a trucking company and with a shale stone supplier.”

This story was updated at 12:35 p.m. 8-10-2022 to add information about Forward Township declaring an emergency.