Sticks or roads—pick your poison

By Z. A. KOHLOA
Posted 7/24/19

DAMASCUS, PA — At the July 15 Board of Supervisors meeting, a resident of Damascus Township sat patiently waiting for his turn to speak. Chairman Joseph Canfield was well aware of this. …

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Sticks or roads—pick your poison

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DAMASCUS, PA — At the July 15 Board of Supervisors meeting, a resident of Damascus Township sat patiently waiting for his turn to speak. Chairman Joseph Canfield was well aware of this. “Anyone else for open floor? Ricci you want to talk?”

“Yeah, I’m just curious,” Anthony Ricci Jr., a resident of Shady Lane, responded. “What’s happening since the last meeting? Nothing really happened on Shady Lane and Main.”

Steven Adams, the operational supervisor, was quick to remind Ricci that they’d been patching the road with cold patch.

“One truck came up just on top of Main. He added some cold patch,” Ricci said, “But the rest of the road going down Main towards 652 is horrible, so is Shady Lane and Steep Hill.”

Adams and Canfield emphasized that the highway department has to grade more than 90 miles of township roads before fall.

Canfield told Ricci he understood his concern about getting his road fixed. He reassured Ricci that they were going to fix Shady Lane and keep patching the road through the summer. “But we can’t let the other 90 miles of road go,” Canfield said. “Instead of having 40 people mad at us we’d have 3,160 other people mad at us. We’ve got to get the rest of the roads done.”

Ricci continued, “At the last meeting you also said you guys were going to clean up the mess they made.”

“You pick a poison,” Adams said. “You want them to pick up sticks or you want them to fix the road?”

Ricci responded that he wanted the roads fixed first.

“I rest my case,” Adams said. “I went over there and it wasn’t that bad. If you take a rake, you can clean it up. A lot of it is small stuff. In six months it will be gone. If everybody took care of their piece of property and kept it cut back it would save the township a fortune. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s also ridiculous for us to have to pay to have everybody’s trees cut and manicured. I tell a lot of people, if you don’t like the way we cut them, then you cut them.”

“We don’t have the equipment to do that either,” Ricci said.

Adams and Canfield both expressed they weren’t trying to be coarse or to act like jerks, but in total, the township has 196 miles of road to cut, with two or three passes to each side.

Canfield shared an incident that happened while workers were putting stone on the road. “The back of the dump truck hit a tree limb, which broke off and fell on the power line and the truck. The tree limb, was against the truck with part of a live wire burning on the frame and another part of the wire burning on the ground,” he said. “I arrived on the scene two hours later and PP&L still hadn’t come to shut the power off. I told the driver to just pull out. It didn’t matter if the truck got banged up more in the process, because he’d been trapped inside the truck for two hours.”

“That’s $25,000 damage to one of our newest trucks,” Adams said.

“The top roof of the truck along the cabin got banged up when the tree limb fell on it. You can still see the burnt marks on the truck,” Canefield said. “Had the right-of-way on that road been cut, this never would’ve happened.”

Damascus Township, roads,

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