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Elliott Road Splits In Two, Threatening At Least One Home

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ELLIOTT (KDKA) -- Joe Gollick has been working on his home on Lander Street in the city's Elliott neighborhood for the past 40 years.

Amy Wadas: "Forty years could slip away if this road slips away."
Joe Gollick: "Well it can. We are hoping it doesn't. This crack has developed here about 10 to 15 years. Never expanded till last couple of years."

Lander Street keeps sinking.

elliott landslide lander street
(Photo Credit: KDKA Photojournalist Ian Smith)

"We've been aware of this for three weeks but over the past couple days, it's gotten worse. So what we're gonna do is continue to monitor the situation but also get the engineers out here and take a look at this and come up with a game plan on how to repair this," city of Pittsburgh Operations Director Guy Costa said.

If it keeps getting worse, Gollick and his wife might have to evacuate. That's something they're not ready to do.

"Everybody has to evacuate if it's an issue but the problem is where do you go? It's not that easy to get up and move. I have two dogs. What are you going to do with the dogs?" Gollick said.

Homes sit below the hillside too. Telephone poles have started to lean and trees have sunk below street level now.

elliott landslide lander street
(Photo Credit: KDKA Photojournalist Ian Smith)

"We did cut some trees. Duquesne Light was here addressing the poles are leaning. They took off a transformer so in the event the hill continues to slide, the transformer wouldn't go down the hill with it," Costa said.

Costa said the city will do all it can to keep the road from sinking even more and keep these residents safe.

"You have to be optimistic it's not going to happen or you're going to be a nervous wreck," Gollick said.

"It's unfortunate. It's just a bad season for slides although it comes with the territory, I guess. We are hilly," neighbor Jeremiah Dengler said.

elliott landslide lander street
(Photo Credit: KDKA Photojournalist Ian Smith)

Costa said the rain is obviously a factor in what's causing the ground beneath Lander Street to move, but he said engineers will come out to the scene and try to figure out what started the cracking to begin with.

Costa said the road started sinking at the same time as the Greenleaf Street landslide in Duquesne Heights which you can see across the way through the trees, and since then has gotten progressively worse.

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