Aiken City officials issued a one week notice to Gem Lakes developers Kisner and Gaul LLC to either fix the sinkhole on Moultrie Drive or wait for the City to bill them for fixing the hole themselves.
On Monday, City Council member Reggie Ebner requested that officials update Council on the sinkhole in Gem Lakes, after a loaded City dump truck fell through a portion of Moultrie Drive last week, leaving a 5-foot-deep hole filled with muddy water in the ground. Engineers determined the leaking storm drain under the area caused the truck to fall through the road's surface, and for the time being, crews covered the hole with stone.
Engineer Rick Toole, whose firm was hired for $30,000 to do a soil and roadway investigation in the Gem Lakes area, said crews were testing whether there was any "movement in the pavement," and once the driver drove the truck through the middle of the road near a patched portion of road, the truck began to fall through.
"When it broke there was 3 inches of asphalt, so evidently they (the developers) had done something to the area in the past," Toole said. "It collapsed very quickly. ... The area was located along a sanitary sewer line and just above a storm sewer culture that crosses the road."
Council and City officials have gone back and forth for several years, meeting with Kisner and Gaul, to come to an agreement on how to move forward in dealing with the roads.
To figure out how the City should move forward, interim City Manager Roger LeDuc said engineers need to continue testing the road and formulate data from those tests to bring back to the City.
"The No. 1 issue is that there's a failed storm-drainage system out there," LeDuc said. " ... The bigger issue, once resolved, is we still need to immediately get that testing done and more expediently then (how) we're doing it right now so that we could then determine what is the other problem with the road itself."
George Grinton, the director of the City's Engineering and Utilities Department, said he spoke with the developers who plan to start work "immediately."
Maayan Schechter is the local government reporter. Follow her on Twitter @MaayanSchechter.