The Vicksburg Board of Mayor and Aldermen on Friday extended an emergency declaration for Washington Street an extra 30 days, and Mayor Paul Winfield said he will meet with engineers to discuss the road condition.

The board declared a 30-day emergency for the street on Feb. 28 after city workers, repairing a waterline leak near a retaining wall south of the Washington Street bridge, reported the wall had shifted.

Winfield said he will meet Monday with representatives from IMS Engineers of Jackson to discuss the results of soil tests at the site of the break and on the roadbed. The city hired IMS when it declared the emergency in February.

He said preliminary test results indicated that six pallets of the street will have to be replaced and work will have to be done to the roadbed.

Washington Street was paved by pouring 10- by 20-foot concrete sections, or pallets.

The street problem was discovered about two weeks after the Washington Street bridge was reopened on Feb. 13 after three years of work. Officials said the problem was not connected to the bridge.

Interim city public works director Garnet Van Norman said on Feb. 28 that the crew repairing the leak apparently saw the wall move as heavy trucks went by, adding there was a gap between the wall and the slope. He said the wall was built either in 1929, when the bridge was built, or in the early 1930s.

Besides declaring the emergency, the board ordered that vehicles weighing more than 26,001 pounds, including tractor-trailer rigs, log trucks, school buses and large emergency vehicles, detoured away from the street.

Built in 1929, the Washington Street bridge was closed in 2009 while Kansas City Southern Railway and Kanza Construction Co. of Topeka, Kan., worked to replace the bridge with a concrete bridge atop a railroad tunnel.

The $8.6 million project was funded with a mix of federal railroad improvement grant money and $3.7 million in bonds the city diverted from the development of a recreation park on Fisher Ferry Road and street paving.