Dec 30, 2012 2 min read

My name is Mark Johnson. My wife Robin and I live in Hopwood. We own the oldest house in Hopwood. It is a beautiful 222-year old stone home and one of the few remaining homes in Pennsylvania that was built in the 1700’s.

On Dec. 22, at 1:30 a.m., we were rudely awakened by a 10-foot wall of road slush slamming into the front of our house, covering our windows and front door with road slush from a PennDOT snowplow.

This is not the first time that this has happened. In fact, I have been trying to get PennDOT to stop doing this for 15 years, and they tell me they will talk to the drivers, but it does no good. The last time this happened, they tore my downspout loose from the stones it was anchored to.

I spoke with Mary Ryan who told me she would refer me to their insurance person, that she talked to the foreman in charge and that he had talked to the drivers about this problem.

I guess that did not make much difference to the drivers who continue to cover our house with frozen slush. In 15 years, no one would meet with me face to face and look at the pictures of what they are doing to an important part of Hopwood history.

I also noticed that the houses and businesses above my house do not even get snow plowed onto their grass, but when the driver gets close to Finley Street, he goes faster to empty his plow so that he does not plow snow in Finley Street, where they usually stop.

It’s too bad that these drivers make all of the good drivers at PennDOT look bad. Maybe someone from PennDOT that actually cares what their drivers are doing will contact me before they break all of the windows in the front of my house, or worse, injure me or my wife since we sleep in one of these rooms. I’m sure that they wouldn’t want one of their fellow drivers doing this to their house.

Mark Johnson

Hopwood