For the past two days, it’s been hard to miss the gaping hole in the ground, surrounded by traffic cones, concrete barricades and construction crews on the north side of the Highway 12-Spring Street intersection.
Starkville Utilities Department is working on a project that department manager Terry Kemp said it hopes will solve problems with street degradation at the intersection.
Kemp said the issue arose while the Mississippi Department of Transportation, which is working on the intersection as part of a repaving project along Highway 12 from Eckford Drive to Russell Street, reported a pothole with water in it. Starkville Utilities then investigated the source, which led to digging into the earth to uncover the line beneath the road.
“There is a six-inch line that goes across Highway 12,” he said. “If you can kind of visualize that, that’s from over near Hampton Inn across to where the excavation is going on over by Chick-Fil-A.”
The department identified that line as the source of the problem, Kemp said. The issue, so far, seems to be the way two pieces of pipe are fitted together, which has allowed water to leak out.
He said that may be the cause of long-standing, recurring road problems at the intersection. The road, especially near the corner by Chick-Fil-A, is prone to developing potholes.
“What we’re addressing today was probably the cause for some of that always popping up and some of the failures of the asphalt,” Kemp said. “Our intent was not to just try to bypass or cover over, but to identify the problem and address it.”
He said the department is working to eliminate the portion of the line that runs across Highway 12, and letting the system reroute to keep up service without further damaging the road.
“We’re in the final stages of that and we’ll know for sure (Thursday), but I think the strategy we’re looking at for now is that we can eliminate that section and we may have an alternate source down the road,” he said.
Project work, detours
Work on the project, which was initially expected to only take one day, started on Tuesday. Kemp said the next phase of work will see excavation on the south side of the intersection on Blackjack Road, by the Hampton Inn. He said the department is hoping work can finish by the end of the day Thursday.
“The next step is to fill it back in and get those lanes back open,” he said. “Then we’ll move to the south side and do some excavation on that end of the pipe, which again will impact traffic flow on Spring Street.”
The intersection is one of the busiest in Starkville. According to an MDOT traffic volume map, the portion of Highway 12 by the intersection saw 26,000 vehicles per day in 2017. The portion of Blackjack Road that feeds into the intersection saw 15,000 vehicles per day in 2017.
While work continues, the utilities department has recommended detours, onto Hancock Street and Russell Street on the north side of the intersection, and onto Locksley Way and South Montgomery Street for traffic coming north on Blackjack Road.
Kemp said the motoring public has so far been cautious and patient with the work. He asked for that to continue as the project presses on.
“We’d just ask for them to always be mindful, not just for their benefit but for our workers out there,” Kemp said. “We do have quite a bit of construction personnel on site in and out.”
Mayor Lynn Spruill said she’s familiar with the issues the Spring Street intersection had been experiencing. She said she was thankful for the work the utilities department has done in discovering the root cause.
“At one point in time we thought it was the sprinkler system over near McDonald’s that was doing it,” Spruill said. “Although that was leaking, this was apparently a 10-foot-underground pipe that we’ve discovered. I will be very glad for us to do that so that we’ll no longer have the deterioration and decay of that street like it had been based on the water eroding the subsurface.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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