Fixing a Hole
A tiny Arkansas town gets ready for a flash flood
Small towns can face the same big problems as big towns when it comes to stormwater infrastructure. This one faced an essential emergency culvert repair without a lot of reserve funding waiting at the bank.
They didn’t fund their way out it; they thought their way out of it. Three days before a flash flood.
“You could see down about 3 feet into that sinkhole,” Arnold Sewell, the mayor of Garner, Ark., tells Better Roads.
A patch was made over the two culverts where the hole was on this south main highway, Sewell says. “But once we got started, [we discovered] there was a bigger hole in the side [of the pipes] than anticipated. The road has four culverts about 50 yards apart. The second set of culverts, where the water main is, has a concrete bridge over them. “These were completely washed out inside,” Sewell says. In fact, the pipes were so eroded they backed up water, always sending typical drainage into the overflow culvert that was supposed to be reserved for emergency stormwater.
