The State College Area School District will have to pay very little for repairs to a small sinkhole discovered underneath Memorial Field last week.
Ed Poprik, SCASD director of physical plant, says repairing the sinkhole will cost the school district next to nothing because the State College Borough handled the vast majority of the work. The subterranean work was finished by Tuesday evening, allowing the district to reopen the field on Wednesday.
The hole – which Poprik “hesitates to classify as a sinkhole” – was a small depression about four feet wide and four feet deep. It was caused by a broken storm water pipe than runs underneath the field, which allowed water to leak beneath the surface of the field and slowly erode some of the soil.
The borough owns and operates the storm water pipe, and had a crew onsite within hours of a SCASD employee discovering the sinkhole last Thursday.
Poprik says borough crews had to excavate rocks out of the hole to reach the broken pipe before repairing the pipe and filling in the hole. A total cost estimate has not been reached.
Poprik says it was “basically impossible to tell” how long the pipe had been broken. He says the collar on the pipe was damaged, which allowed water to escape beneath the field.
“My guess is that it had been broken for sometime, maybe at the time of installation, so it created a little hole that got bigger and bigger before eventually collapsing,” Poprik says. “But as far as problems go, this was relatively minor and we were able to tidy it up pretty quickly.”
Poprik says the discovery of the sinkhole caused very little disruption to any scheduled activities at Memorial Field. Although one lacrosse clinic had to be relocated last week, the field will be open on Wednesday evening just in time for regularly-scheduled athletic practices.
The district still has to pay an outside company to come back in and “stitch the turf back together” around the former hole, but Poprik says that’s a very minor expense.
Although Memorial Field has had problems with sinkholes in the past, Poprik stresses that this latest depression has nothing to do with previous sinkholes caused by poor drainage. In 2013, the school district completed a multi-million dollar project to improve the field’s drainage and geologic structure, which has successfully prevented further drainage-related issues.
