Schuylkill Expressway

Engineers liken it to filling a tooth. First they drill a hole, then they inject a cement mixture to fill in all the underlying cracks and voids. Then they seal it and hope they have stopped the decay. A western Pennsylvania firm that specializes in sealing abandoned coal mines is applying the drill-and-fill technique to the Schuylkill Expressway, where cavities in underground limestone formations threaten to collapse a portion of the four-lane roadway east of the Route 202 interchange.

Motorists traveling at night on a 7.5-mile stretch of the Schuylkill Expressway will encounter backups and traffic headaches beyond the norm for the next few months. Starting at 8 p.m. today and continuing until late November, crews will repair and resurface a section of the interstate highway between the Blue Route and the Belmont Avenue interchanges. From 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. Monday through Thursday, and from 8 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Monday, workers will reduce sections of the road to one lane.

Federal authorities are investigating what they called a suspicious package found on the Schuylkill Expressway at the Belmont Avenue exit ramp last night - an incident that prompted authorities to shut down the highway in both directions for more than three hours. According to the Pennsylvania State Police, members of the state and Montgomery County bomb squads were trying to figure out what was inside the suspicious metal box with the letters "ELF" on the front of the package.

Remember all that construction on the Schuylkill Expressway last fall that sometimes had the area choking on its own traffic on evenings and weekends? Well, starting Sunday night, with the winter break behind them, construction crews will be at it again. At a news conference yesterday, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation district administrator Andrew L. Warren discussed what he called a "preview of coming distractions. " As part of a $20 million PennDot project to resurface the main artery between Philadelphia and its western suburbs, crews soon will begin work on two sections of the highway.

People complain about the wattage of their elected leaders in Harrisburg, but this week, a few legislators came up with a bright new idea for the Schuylkill Expressway: tolls. That may sound like a bad plan for a highway so congested that rush-hour traffic moves at a creep, at times speeding up to a crawl. And it's true that an I-76 toll is just the dream of some ticked-off rural lawmakers. In response to proposals that would turn I-80 across northern Pennsylvania into a toll road - raising money for SEPTA and other transportation projects - they suggested charging drivers of highways in this corner of Pennsylvania, including the Schuylkill.

One man was killed early Easter morning in a shooting on the Schuylkill Expressway near the Montgomery Drive exit that closed the highway for three hours. Police said they do not believe the shooting was random. Police have identified the victim as Kareem El, 29, hometown unknown. El was driving a silver 1997 Buick LeSabre eastbound on the highway about 2:50 a.m. when an unknown vehicle pulled up along its passenger side and fired numerous shots inside, according to Pennsylvania State Police.

In a response to complaints from residents, the police department has stepped up its issuance of traffic tickets. The crackdown, Mayor Michael Leonard said, began last week and was prompted by a traffic problem that has long plagued this small town of 1,200 where the Blue Route and the Schuylkill Expressway meet. Leonard said about 100 citations have been issued in the last week. That's compared with 108 issued for the month of May. The borough, with dozens of narrow streets, is sliced in two by one of the area's key intersections.

A suspect in the four-month-old killing of a Germantown man for the gold chain he was wearing was arrested yesterday by a Highway Patrol officer on the Schuylkill Expressway, police said. The suspect, Rodney Williams, 19, of the 6200 block of North Park Avenue in Logan, was charged with murder, robbery, violation of the Uniform Firearms Act and possession of an instrument of crime. A warrant had been issued for his arrest in August after Derrick Thomas, 19, was shot in the head and robbed of the gold chain on a Germantown street.

Tomorrow morning, Schuylkill Expressway commuters doing the bumper grind through the construction zone at King of Prussia will find a startling change of scenery: a 484-foot-long, 42-foot-tall behemoth of a railroad bridge that hadn't been there during the Friday rush home. In the overnight hours this weekend, crews have been assembling the 1,500-ton prefabricated steel-truss structure over the highway. Sizewise, it will have few rivals in the region; the Market Street Bridge over the Schuylkill in Center City, for instance, is nearly 200 feet shorter.

The tragic circumstances sound almost like bad fiction: A veteran state trooper - renowned for reconstructing highway crashes and nabbing drunken or negligent motorists - dies in a head-on collision while driving the wrong way on the Schuylkill Expressway in the middle of the night. And the death of State Police Cpl. John Quigg Jr. came just eight hours before he was due Wednesday morning in Montgomery County Court on his own drunken-driving charge. The crash seriously injured the other driver, Chantelle Harper, described by a family friend as a gifted young Rosemont College graduate bound for law school.

Here is Sam Carchidi's key to Wednesday's Game 4: The Flyers need to make Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury continue to feel as if he is on the Schuylkill Expressway. Traffic. Traffic. Traffic.

It was nearly 3 a.m. Easter morning when a car pulled up alongside the eastbound silver 1997 Buick LeSabre on the Schuylkill Expressway. A barrage of shots followed. The driver of the Buick was killed, and the gunman or gunmen fled in a vehicle of unknown make and model. State police on Sunday were searching for answers in the dramatic and deadly shooting, which closed one of Philadelphia's busiest highways for three hours. But they seemed fairly certain the shooting did not appear random.

Harris M. Steinberg is executive director of PennPraxis of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia is a city of hidden treasures. From the vast acreage of parkland that stretches deep into the Wissahickon Valley to the wooden paving blocks of her tiniest alleys, Philadelphia reveals herself in layers. When the first Dutch settlers piloted their boats up the Schuylkill, they called it the "Hidden River. " Unlike the broad and swiftly flowing Delaware, the tidal Schuylkill meanders gently, bending back and forth as it snakes its way from the Delaware to what is now the falls at the Art Museum.

A man who was hit by a car and killed on the Schuylkill Expressway in Montgomery County Tuesday afternoon was identified by state police as Joseph McHenrey of Drexel Hill. Police said McHenrey climbed over a concrete median in Upper Merion Township about 1:45 p.m. holding a gas can, trying to cross the eastbound expressway to get to the right shoulder of the road. Meanwhile, Robert Clark, of Downingtown, was driving his white Toyota Tundra pickup truck about 50 mph, pulling a single-axle trailer and heading toward McHenrey, police said.

A heads-up for city drivers: Today, Saturday and Sunday will see street closures because of the Philadelphia Marathon and some affiliated runs. Today: Parkway. The inner lanes of the Ben Franklin Parkway in both directions were closed this afternoon, in preparation for the races. The outbound lanes will reopen at 3 p.m. for the afternoon rush, then close again at 6:30 p.m., according to police. The inbound lanes will remain closed until Sunday evening. Saturday: Logan Circle to King Drive.

FAIRMOUNT PARK is the nation's largest park system, with 9,200 acres. In 2008 it had a budget of $15 million, but by 2010 it was down to $11 million - which barely meets the park's most basic maintenance needs. And its budget situation just keeps getting worse. We need to think out of the box about how to fund the system into the future. The Fairmount Park Commission and other civic leaders have been looking for ways to generate more funding through other means, such as improved concessions.

As of about 7:30 a.m., an accident on the Girard Point Bridge in South Philadelphia was still backing up traffic on I-95 South as far as the Walt Whitman Bridge. The right lane of I-95 was blocked, according to traffic.com. Only a few cars at a time were squeezing by, as seen on a PennDOT traffic camera. One alternate route was to take the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76) to Pennrose Avenue back to I-95 south of the bridge. For area traffic updates at any time, go to http://go.philly.com/traffic . Contact staff writer Peter Mucha at 215-854-4342 or pmucha@phillynews.com .  

The University Avenue drawbridge over the Schuylkill River will be closed to traffic and pedestrians between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday, Streets Department officials announced. Alternate routes around the bridge include Gray's Ferry Avenue to the south, and the Schuylkill Expressway and South Street Bridge to the north. While the bridge is closed Streets Department workers will perform routine maintenance, and will reopen the bridge early if work is completed ahead of schedule.

It would have taken just seconds for Lateisha Johnson's car to vanish from the highway late Wednesday, police said. When Johnson turned her black Infiniti off the Schuylkill Expressway toward the northbound ramp to Roosevelt Boulevard shortly before midnight, with her 15-year-old daughter in the seat beside her, there was likely no traffic nearby. No one was there to call for help when Johnson, a mother of three, lost control of her car and it crashed through the guardrail, hit an embankment, and wound up in the branches of a tree, 40 feet above the ground.