Buffalo Run floods I-99 treatment pond

Buffalo Run crested over its banks downstream of Skytop acid drainage sites early Saturday, blowing out pipes, flooding a treatment pond and forcing the state to evacuate three families.

Some Mattern Lane residents in the Skytop foothills, downstream of the treatment pond, spent a sleepless night bailing out a neighbor’s basement and came away from the ordeal convinced that I-99 engineering had channeled more water their way than before.

“We’ve had heavy rain before, but we’ve never had the kind of runoff problems until they started that up there,” said Jay Sievers, a 26-year Mattern Lane resident. “It’s got to be the runoff from up there. We’ve never had runoff problems in 26 years.”

Anthony Poy, project inspector for the state Department of Transportation, said the treatment pond, intended to neutralize acidic runoff from the construction site, acted as a dam and lessened the damage from 5 inches of rain in less than 24 hours.

The culvert pipes that blew out carry water from a Buffalo Run tributary under U.S. Route 322 and the I-99 corridor to merge with Buffalo Run along Mattern Lane. Water filled the treatment pond and gushed over the spillway, washing away part of the unpaved Mattern Lane.

Poy and work crews from contractor HRI Inc. spent all night on Skytop working to mitigate the impact of the rain on the acid-rock remediation sites. Poy returned to the area about noon Saturday and gestured to the treatment pond and the I-99 engineering in general around Buffalo Run.

“Everybody wants to blame it on this, but if it wasn’t here, there would have been nothing stopping it, nothing holding it back,” Poy said. “I think it did pretty good for 5 inches of rain.”

Poy, with Buffalo Run waters rising in the darkness of Saturday morning, knocked on doors of to ask residents if they wanted to spend the night at a motel. Three families accepted the offer, though rooms were hard to find because thousands of football fans were in town for a Penn State home game.

A Mattern Lane resident who refused the offer, Alen Ghaner, spent the night instead shoring up the Buffalo Run banks with lumber to keep the stream out of his home. The water crested ankle-deep in his basement, with Ghaner and neighbors fighting it all the way.

“We had three guys down here — two guys were brooming, one guy was bucketing,” Ghaner said.

Ghaner, a 15-year Mattern Lane resident, agreed with Sievers that the new landscaping around the Buffalo Run headwaters had poured too much water through his neighborhood.

A four-foot pipe carrying Buffalo Run under a small bridge in his back yard turned into a bottleneck, he said, whereas the three-foot pipe that it replaced had never jammed.

“You see that pipe down there with the water running through? You couldn’t see that last night. The water was up over the bank in my yard. I’ve never seen it over the bridge at all before.”

With Buffalo Run roaring out of a huge treatment pond pipe Saturday afternoon, Ghaner and Sievers asked Poy to re-tool some of the earthwork downstream to better protect their property. Poy said crews would be working around the pond all week.

Early Saturday afternoon, Ghaner pointed to a ring around a tree, about three feet above Buffalo Run and the high-water mark from overnight flooding. “We’ve never had this much water before, ever,” he said.