Emergency repairs on a ruptured water main on a northwest Atlanta street are complete, but there is still road work to be done. The ruptured main created a sinkhole that swallowed one lane of Collier Drive early Monday morning.
By evening, the main had been repaired, but the road will remain closed to through traffic until street repairs are complete, said Cameo Garrett, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Watershed Management. Those repairs will continue during the week, she said.
Earlier Monday, Scheree Rawles, another spokeswoman for the water department, said the rupture was caused by the recent cold weather.
“It was really freezing cold two days go, then yesterday, it was 56 degrees,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The pipe expands, contracts, expands, contracts, and it can cause the pipe to burst.”
The problem started out as a small hole in the pavement, but “as the water continued to flow, it caused a sinkhole,” Rawles said. “The sinkhole is probably five feet deep, maybe 12 feet wide.”
She said other utilities in the area complicated the repair process.
“There is a piece of the road that has washed away and there are fiber optics in that piece of the road,” she said. “Also, there was a power pole leaning and we called Georgia Power and we had to wait on them to come out.”
—Staff writer Michelle Shaw contributed to this report.
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