NEWS UPDATE, Wednesday, July 9: This story has been updated to reflect repair progress and road reopening timelines.
Crews repaired a sinkhole that opened on a closed stretch of Airport Road in Niagara-on-the-Lake Monday afternoon, after a vehicle drove over a heaved patch caused by a water main break.
The area was closed “for safety and traffic reasons” until around 6 p.m. Tuesday, said Jason Misner, spokesperson for Niagara Region, in an email.
The roadway is now open to traffic with a granular base at the repair site. The road will be repaved and fully restored by Thursday, said John Brunet, associate director of water operations and maintenance.
Excavators remained on site throughout the afternoon and into the evening on Monday to do a temporary repair, said Brunet.
Water service was restored overnight and then shut down again when crews returned Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. to complete a permanent repair.
At the time of Brunet’s response — just before 5 p.m. Tuesday — repairs and testing were completed and the water main was back to full service.
Through its online monitoring system, the region was alerted to a surge in water flow and dispatched crews to the site around 8:30 a.m., he said.
After identifying that the water main between Queenston Road and Lincoln Avenue was leaking, the region closed the area to motorists.
The sinkhole formed after a driver attempted to drive over the raised section of road, rather than go around it, said Marion Boychuk, lead hand at Archer Traffic Control Inc., who was called in to assist with traffic control. This caused the road to collapse.
“They stopped, turned around and looked — and by that time — they called somebody and said, hey, you got problems down here. It had sunk,” said Boychuk from the scene. Alfred Beam Excavating was on the scene as well.
While The Lake Report hasn’t determined the exact size of the sinkhole, it appears to take up approximately half of one lane of traffic and is around the size of a compact car.
Misner said the region didn’t take a measurement of the hole’s width and that the deepness of it “wasn’t significant in size.”
It’s unclear at this time how the vehicle accessed the road if it was closed to traffic shortly after 8:30 a.m., or whether the driver was a local resident given special access or a worker in the area.
The driver wasn’t at the scene when Boychuk arrived, she said, and she doesn’t know if their vehicle was damaged. She said she didn’t know how much the road repair would cost the region, but that the driver wouldn’t be held responsible for the damage.
Boychuk said about 30 minutes passed between the time her crew was dispatched and when they began responding.
“The region got out here and did the lane closure with the yield on-coming (signage) until I was able to get out here,” she said.
Incidents like this aren’t as rare as they might seem in NOTL, said Boychuk.
“In this heat? Absolutely,” said Boychuk from the scene, when asked if she’s seen this kind of thing happen in NOTL before.
“All these old farms — they’ve been here for generations.”
Boychuk said the area has seen its fair share of tractor-trailers barreling down the road and people treating it like a “speedway.”
And since the infrastructure is steel, Boychuk said the region and Alfred Beam Excavating would likely have to “rip the whole road open” to determine how to repair it.
“That’s the problem with this one,” she said. “It’s not a new one.”
