NATCHEZ — A portion of Franklin Street will be closed for at least two more days while city crews work to repair a hole that is 11-feet deep under the road.

City Engineer David Gardner said public works crews discovered the void under the street while attempting to raise a manhole on a sunken part of the street.

“Once we got in there and started doing that, we saw that there was a void under the pavement,” he said. “Once we broke through, you could actually see an 11-foot drop off, so we immediately closed the road.”

Gardner said the void under the street would have resulted in a sinkhole if it had not been discovered.

Gardner said the void was caused because the storm drain pipes on both sides of the manhole were broken.

“The whole thing is complicated by there being a sewer line there, too,” Gardner said. “The sewer line is fine, but we had to remove it so we could work on the storm drain pipes.”

Depending on the availability of materials, Gardner said crews are working to have the road open by the weekend.

Franklin Street is closed beginning at its intersection with Martin Luther King Jr. Street. Traffic is being detoured down Martin Luther King Jr. Street.

“We’re very sorry for the inconvenience, but these things happen,” Gardner said. “We’re very fortunate to have caught it now before it collapsed and a car went off in there.”

The settling or sinking of the street that originally led to crews to start repairing the street, Gardner said, was likely caused because the street does not have a good foundation underneath it.

Gardner said records show that area of the street was a bayou that was filled in with brick and trash materials and then a street was constructed over it in the 1800s. Sometime later, asphalt was put on top of the road, as well as curb and gutter.

“It just doesn’t have a good foundation to withstand the weight of garbage trucks and Greyhound buses that travel roads now and didn’t back then,” Gardner said. “The road had sunk down because of all the weight, and luckily we found it before there was a (sinkhole) where that void is.”

The cost of the repairs to Franklin Street is unknown at this point, Gardner said. A similar, but larger, repair on Brenham Avenue last year cost approximately $80,0000.

“It’s tens of thousands of dollars anytime you have a hole this large,” Gardner said.