No More Blasts Required For West Carson Street Hillside

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- The blasting is over!

While crews weren't totally happy with the results of Wednesday's blast on Carson Street, they say they made enough progress, and now West Carson Street may reopen sooner than first thought.

"We made a lot of progress yesterday afternoon and evening with the excavators. So we decided another blast was not necessary," said Rudy Husband with Norfolk Southern.

60 truckloads of fallen rock left yesterday, and they are well on the way to 200 or more today, loading and hauling as the heavy equipment picked at the hillside. Others on ropes did the work by hand and contemplated how to get the boulders to fall.

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At about 1:30 p.m., their efforts showed signs of working. Everyone pulled back and waited.

Finally the result they wanted all along.

"It's a huge sense of relief that we have this hillside smooth and clean and mostly stable, there's still some picking at we're going to be doing for a while but it's 99 percent of where we needed to be," Husband said.

Of course what's up there has to get down and into the trucks. They'll pause from midnight to dawn to push some trains through, then back at it with daylight. The good news for 16,000 Carson Street drivers. Today's development means they can look at reopening West Carson Street earlier than Saturday morning.