On April 23, a portion of Old Indian Trail collapsed, forcing it to be closed to the public, except for those who live on the road. The road’s failure is nearest to the driveway of Pat and Maryanne Quick, who maintain that this was due to a local construction company bringing heavy equipment over the road from the south to work at the park across from the Milton Train station.

Supervisor Scott Corcoran said he makes calls weekly, seeking answers from the town’s engineers on how to fix this dangerous situation.

“I go up there every couple of days to make sure nothing else has moved,” he said, adding that he and two councilpersons along with the heads of the Water and Highway Departments recently toured the collapsed portion of the roadway.

Corcoran believes there are three possible options: keeping Old Indian Trail a north/south roadway but dig into the western embankment to widen it; another choice is to make a roundabout at the bottom of the Quick’s property and make the road one way coming in or a third option would be to fix the actual collapsed hillside, “and that’s the very difficult one.”

Corcoran said he wants the Geotech Company to determine, “if it is possible to drill into that hillside and get a good footing. It would be some ordeal because it’s a shale bed and the top layer has larger sliding pieces of shale, and underneath that shale is a very loose, gravelly-type shale that actually gives way fairly easily. So what really happened is that underneath it gave way and the top layer slid off, which took part of the road that took the side of the hill and the trees and everything with it.”

Councilman Dave Zambito said, “if it was 1940 we probably would build a wall and be done with it, but you can’t do that anymore because it’s on CSX [railroad] property, and to get clearance from them to work along the tracks is almost impossible, they don’t allow you down there.” He said the Geotech company wants to do some borings to better determine exactly what type of material is there.

“Just by looking at it, it looks impossible to build off of because it’s on an angle and it’s on a slope. What happened is that water got underneath and it created a landslide,” he said, adding that CSX owns about 50 feet off the tracks and the rest is privately owned. “We have a right of use to put a road in so we would maintain it but there is so much liability involved and nowadays somebody does something and causes an accident or causes somebody to get hurt, we’re all liable. We have to go through the proper procedure, which everybody gets frustrated about, including the property owner that lost part of his driveway, but we’re constantly thinking about this on a daily basis, communicating with each other. We’ve paid several visits to the site and it’s just in the engineer’s hands right now before we can make a move.”

Corcoran said there are now three signs posted and a jersey barrier that says the road is closed and do not enter in order to alert the public about this situation.

“Can we stop everybody from going around it [barrier], no, but I can’t have a police officer sitting there 24/7; so yes, people will go up that road and get to the end of the Quick’s property and they will have to make a turnaround but they are not supposed to be on that road; Old Indian Trail is closed so do not go down there, because you’re going to have a very difficult time turning around.”

Compounding the problem is that the Geotech company has not provided the town with a time frame on when they will examine the road or conduct test borings. Corcoran said he is waiting for them to determine how the town is to move forward.