It has been a busy few weeks for County Road and Bridge engineer Harry Walker following a record amount of rainfall in October. Up until recently, many roads in the county were still closed. But, at Wednesday’s meeting of Commissioner’s Court, he gave an update on two roads in particular that sustained big damage, the first being near Iola.
“On County Road 162 West, we had a culvert that collapsed. It has been underwater for several days, then as soon as the water went down, a heavy load came through and collapsed the culverts. We just, as of Tuesday, reopened that road and have replaced those culverts,” Walker said.
In September, the County Road 132 bridge was replaced, just to sustain crippling damage in the October storm. Walker brought a proposal before the Commissioners that asked for Wakefield Construction to make additional improvements to the bridge.
“Basically, the stream there…it got behind the wing wall and ended up eating out about half the road there. So, what we would like to do, it extend those wing walls parallel to the road to prevent that from happening in the future.”
Walker also mentioned that County Road 141 sustained major damage and is still closed at this time.
There is no set timetable yet for the opening of the roads.
