NEW ORLEANS —
A notorious sinkhole at Esplanade Avenue and Marais Street has flummoxed Treme neighbors and terrorized drivers for months.
“At first they came out to look at it, I guess to identify the problem and once they found the problem, they just never came back,” Deaunt Robinson said.
Tuesday morning, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board finally put barricades around the hole.
"Us neighbors who live on this street call this River Esplanade because this has been leaking, our whole street for a long time now," Beau Mazurek said. “Multiple attempts of trying to fix it, obviously you can see it hasn’t been a success.”
Utility leaders appeared before a city council committee.
They told members the water board is working to shorten the time it takes to make repairs, fix a pothole like this one and repave the street.
"We need to respond much faster when we create a hole after we make a repair to a water main or a sewer main, we want to repair that pavement within two to four weeks,” SWBNO Executive Director Ghassan Korban said.
Right now, it’s taking on average 80 days to make repairs and restore the street surface. That’s down from about 100 days.
The water board has a backlog of 3000 work orders. It would like to get that number down to 1000 by the end of the year.
“We’re structuring our crews a little differently,” Korban said. “We’re bringing more efficiency to the process. We’re bringing a little bit more equipment, and a little bit more training.”
Back on Esplanade, crews are now prepping to replace a 20-inch valve under the road.
“We’re very pleased to see that. I just want to see it done,” Mazurek said. “I’d rather have them come down here and make it a priority because we all know Esplanade is a very popular Street. We have a lot traffic that comes down this street.”
According to the Sewerage and Water Board, crews are expected to complete the repairs here this weekend. At this point they are not expected to cut off the water while the fix is underway.
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