CAMDEN COUNTY, N.J. (KYW Newsradio) — It will be a while before the collapsed retaining wall on I-295 in Bellmawr gets fixed. Elected leaders and transportation officials took questions from drivers Wednesday night. They did not give many definitive answers.
The soil gave out, and part of a retaining wall collapsed on a massive project underway to clean up the intersection of Routes 76, 42 and 295 in March, making the congestion there even worse.
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New Jersey Transportation Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti said a team of engineers and contractors are investigating the collapse from two weeks ago.
"What caused this to happen? We do not have a definitive answer," Gutierrez-Scaccetti said. "We do not want to speculate on what happened, so we are in a very, very significant data-collection mode."
Investigators will determine if the cause was human error or a natural occurrence, and it will probably take a month or so to be sure.
"We will then go about determining how we rebuild the retaining wall. The project is going to go on. We’re too far along to do anything else. We will be in a position then, and only then, to talk about how we now go about putting this wall back up," she said.
"Until we really know the root cause, we can’t design the repair."
There’s no telling how much this will cost or who will be on the hook to pay for the additional work, and Gutierrez-Scaccetti says the right lane will stay closed for a while.
The project was in Phase 3 of 4, and there are a few years left in this phase, so it is unclear how much time this will add to the overall plan.
"I think realistically, we have to accept that there is going to be some lost time. It’s just we’re going to do our very best to minimize that," she said. "As soon as that land is safe to open, we will reopen it."
A third-party forensic engineer will evaluate all of the data available to help determine the cause.
The commissioner says the Department of Transportation website will be updated at least once a month with important information about the project.