Weather permitting, city officials may be able to reopen Porter’s Chapel Road Friday afternoon, public works director Garnet Van Norman said.

The city closed the 2100 block of Porter’s Chapel Road Nov. 13 to repair a broken 60-inch drainage culvert under the street.

The work required city officials to reroute traffic from the area while the work was underway.

Van Norman said the metal culvert had collapsed, adding, “It was rusted completely out. It was either going to fall in one day or we just planned to shutdown (Porter’s Chapel) and fix it.” He said the pipe was replaced with a plastic 60-inch pipe that is expected to last longer than the metal pipe it’s replacing.

He said Thursday workers were in the process of completing the repairs and resurfacing the road.

“We’ve got the concrete poured back in it yesterday, we’re backfilling it today, and if we can backfill the edges and get it striped, we’ll open it up tomorrow (Friday) afternoon if the rain doesn’t get us,” he said. “If the rain gets us, it will be next week sometime.”

Porter’s Chapel is not the only street where repairs have been delayed. Van Norman said several factors have delayed the completion of an overlay project on Sky Farm Avenue. A section of Sky Farm is being overlaid as part of a paving program in the North Ward funded by the city’s 2015 capital improvements bond issue.

It could be after the first of the year before the work is completed, Van Norman said.

“They (contactor Central Asphalt) have milled (removed) the surface off it and got ready to overlay it, and it got caught up in the holidays and the rain,” he said. “They’ll get to it as quick as they can.”

He said the contractor is also limited on the amount of asphalt it can get for the work because of the time of year. Most asphalt companies in the area close in December, Van Norman said, because conditions are usually too cold to lay asphalt. If temperatures are too cold, he said, asphalt cannot be laid properly.

He said the contractor is getting its asphalt from a plant in Jackson, “And when you truck it all the way from Jackson, you’re limited,” he said. “We get asphalt from Jackson for our pothole truck, but it’s got a heater to keep it hot.”

In a dump truck, however, the asphalt cools down on the trip from Jackson to Vicksburg.

“Hopefully they’ll get some good weather and get it paved before Christmas,” he said.