As the city awaits repairs to a dangerously eroding slope on Washington Street at the Clark Street bridge, a chunk of land has washed away along Clay Street near its intersection with North Frontage Road.

The widening hole, less than 3 feet from Clay Street, will be tended to by Mississippi Department of Transportation maintenance crews who have placed orange and white highway barrels near the spot.

“They’ve been waiting for some dry weather to get the dirt work done without getting into a bigger mess,” MDOT district engineer Kevin Magee said Friday afternoon. It was not known how long the area has been eroding, but Magee guessed that it occurred over the winter. “They were keeping an eye on it, but it got to the point where they put the barrels out.”

Friday afternoon, cars passed the area at upwards of 40 miles per hour, coming from East Clay Street or from the Interstate 20 exit ramp, heading west past area hotels on the left and the Vicksburg National Military Park on the right.

From North Frontage Road, the hole reveals a drainage pipe emerging from under Clay Street. Dirt has washed away underneath a separate concrete structure running parallel to Clay. The erosion has washed away dirt and vegetation under the drain pipe and concrete barrier, creating a large hole.

Vicksburg city engineer Garnet Van Norman said some utilities run alongside the roadway in that area.

Across town, along Washington Street, erosion has worsened over the past two months. The Board of Mayor and Aldermen declared an emergency Tuesday in response to the rapidly eroding area, which has lost an estimated 10 feet of land since January. About 2 feet of green space remains between Washington Street and the gully formed largely by a storm drain that empties there.

City public works director Bubba Rainer said Thursday that from bids received this week, a repairs contract has been initiated with Kanza Construction.

The widening gulch caused the Clark Street Bridge to be closed Jan. 23, with traffic diverted through City Park.

Rainer said the city had anticipated repair bids to fall between $500,000 to $700,000. Kanza’s bid was $434,917, Rainer said, which is only for repairing the slope and replacing storm and sanitary sewers.

A larger, more expensive project will be to replace the 80-year-old bridge over the railroad tracks at Clark Street. Bids for that work came in at $9 million to $10 million. A number of funding sources have been identified including Kansas City Southern Railroad, the Federal Railroad Administration and $5 million of a $16.9 million city bond issue in 2006, but Mayor Laurence Leyens said this week that the city is scrambling to find an additional $3 million to $4 million for the project.

For now, stabilizing the erosion is critical, Rainer said.

“I don’t know whether they’ll be on the job (Friday),” he said. “We probably won’t see actual movement until the first part of next week.” Rainer added that the city was set to move, with easements in place. “It’s imperative that we start this immediately.”

The city received a grant for up to $400,000 from the National Resource Conservation Service, Rainer said, that will pay about 75 percent of the cost to fill and stabilize the slope. City coffers will have to finance the storm drain and sewer replacements and repairs.

Magee said erosion problems are a common occurrence in Vicksburg.

The MDOT’s 3rd district covers an area along the river from just south of Clarksdale to just north of Natchez, he said. “From Vicksburg toward Port Gibson is the area that we probably see the most loess-type soil. It’s a different type of soil than you’d see in other areas of the state, and we generally do have problems because it’s highly erodable.”

Another site of MDOT-maintained roadway with erosion problems lies along North Frontage Road about two-tenths of a mile west of Old Highway 27. That site also is marked with the orange and white highway barrels.

Lucy Hurst, MDOT maintenance engineer in Yazoo City, said the underlying source of the erosion there, a broken drainage pipe, has been fixed. Like the site on Clay Street, replacing the dirt and filling in the hole cannot begin until drier weather.

“We have already extended the drainage pipe that had broken off,” Hurst said. “We just need to replace the dirt but have not been able to get back in and put it back.”

Vicksburg’s loess deposits are believed to date to glacial times, 10,000 to possibly 100,000 years old. An Army Corps of Engineers study estimated that it is over 100 feet thick in places. Fossil remains found in the loess include mastodon, horse, tiger, bear, deer and bison.

*

Contact Pamela Hitchins at phitchins@vicksburgpost.com