Update: County Public Works Department officials said the Nice/Lucerne Cutoff would re-open at 3 p.m. Wednesday.
NORTH SHORE— Lyle Swartz, road superintendent for the Lake County Public Works Department, discovered a sinkhole on the Rodman Slough bridge Tuesday morning while driving toward Nice. “I was driving down the road and noticed a little hole by the bridge abutment and I stopped to investigate. After investigating I noticed there was a huge cavern underneath the road from when we had those storm waters when it was flooded here and somehow was backwashing underneath the road here.”
Swartz went on to state that there’s a concrete abutment that goes down from the bridge and on the backside of that concrete, on the roadside, that washed everything underneath the road out.
“It doesn’t take much and it starts eating away in there and everything sunk underneath the footings. So we exposed these holes and filled the void in with slurry and then we’ll patch this and that will get us by until we do a permanent fix,” he said adding that when the water recedes and the crews can get down in here underneath the abutments and pump slurry, county crews will then rip wrap further down into the ground to prevent any water than can undermine in the future.
“By tomorrow, I’ll be able to patch these holes and then by 4 o’clock I should be able to open the cutoff again to traffic,” he said. “That will give me time for the slurry to cure out. It’ll be safe and we’ll do the rest of the repairs in the fall once the lake’s receded down from the underside.”
Lake County Public Works Director Scott De Leon said the sinkhole was likely a result of high storm water flows in Middle Creek and Rodman Slough. “It looks like the headwall for the bridge was undermined and it created a sinkhole right at the beginning of the bridge,” he said.
De Leon confirmed Swartz’ time table for opening up the cutoff. “We’re saying it should be open by 4 p.m. If we can get the cutoff open sooner, we will. We filled the sinkhole with cement slurry and that takes some time to set up. We’ll be back out there tomorrow patching some holes and as soon as that slurry is set up, we’ll be able to open the road.”
County officials stated no one went down into the sinkhole. It was about 3 feet deep and 3 feet wide and ran the entire width of the roadway along the face of the headwall of the bridge. “No one needed to get down in it, we just filled it with concrete,” said De Leon.
“Our road superintendent, Lyle Swartz, discovered the sinkhole in the center of the road,” he said. “He’s pretty familiar with the roads in Lake County and he saw a hole in the pavement where there shouldn’t be a hole. It was good that he observed that and we certainly prevented some serious damage there. If that hole had collapsed and a vehicle had crashed into that it would not be good.”
