Sinkhole in Cleburne Neighborhood Still Not Fixed After 1 Year

Families in a North Texas neighborhood are fed up after a sinkhole that formed on a residential street a year ago is still not fixed today.

It all started when a 72-inch underground metal drainage pipe broke on Cedar Street near Tremont Street in Cleburne in April or May 2016.

Neighbor Albert Salazar is among a handful of residents directly affected by the subsequent road closure.

"The barricade's been here for probably 10 months," he said, looking at a road closed sign near his front yard. "It's bad."

The barricades have been keeping traffic away from the crumbling sinkhole that formed after the six-foot pipe failed.

According to the city, the pipe had been underground for at least 50 years.

"It was just a little bitty hole when I came home one day," he said. "And they came in with a backhoe and started knocking it in even more and just put up the barricades and just left it."

Salazar and others tell NBC 5 they feel ignored by the city.

"If this had been on the other side of town by some big, nice houses they'd have fixed this in a couple of months," he said.

The city manager agreed to respond to residents' complaints.

"The message is: we hear you, we hear you loud and clear," said Steve Polasek.

Polasek became city manager in December and admits the city could have communicated better with affected neighbors.

"We recognize it's been a long process," he said. "We appreciate the patience of those citizens that utilize that area and live in that section of town."

Polasek says this project is one of many the cash-strapped city is trying to complete.

"We're playing catch-up," he said.

The project, he says, is too large for the city to handle. It will be bid out in May with the goal of construction beginning by July.

The city has allocated $500,000 for the project, according to Polasek.

Asked why it's taken the city so long to fix, Polasek responded:

"Unfortunately, there's some transition in the administration. Not only in public works, but in my office as well. Again, that's not an excuse and like I said, I wish we would have addressed it quicker and our goal moving forward is to make sure we do address those type of situations in a much more timely manner."

A similar sinkhole formed a couple streets over recently. Neighbors say it took the city a long time to respond to that incident as well.

And there's also concern this city that dates back more than a century has this same type of corrugated metal pipe in other areas.

"There's a lot of pipe underground that we really don't even have a record of and we're trying to get records of some of those pipes, but unfortunately some of those things we find through failures," said Polasek.

Residents near Cedar and Tremont have been diverted onto other roads in the meantime.

The city brought in concrete blocks to try and prevent people from driving onto private property to get around the closure and back onto Cedar.

An elderly homeowner has even parked his pickup truck to try and block people from driving onto his property.