Pike Street businessman and resident complains of damage from rocking concrete panel over sinkhole

By Mike Rutledge
NKyTribune Reporter

Ever since the fall, when a sinkhole developed on West Pike Street near Madison, the trucks that pass over a rocking concrete panel have been rattling nearby buildings and riling at least one building owner.

After a recent spate of complaints by pottery artist Rick Hoffman, the city has informed him that TANK buses will be rerouted around the section of street starting today. Other truck traffic will not be diverted from the short segment of Pike because it’s not a major truck passageway, City Engineer Mike Yeager said Friday.

Hoffman zipped an email to Yeager and other Covington officials a week ago, urging they take action against the shifting street, which he says is damaging nearby buildings and cracking not-very-old decorative sidewalks the city paid to install.

“It’s been two months since our last email and seven months since our first,” Hoffman complained. ”The heavy vehicles continue to shake our foundation on a frequent basis and damage our building. Nothing has improved,” he wrote, in the email, which containined snapshots of his building’s cracked building facade.

Hoffman urged speedier action by the city, arguing, “Your negligence in this matter has allowed our brick façade to crack in two places. Not only has the mortar cracked on each side of the second floor lintel, but the bricks have also cracked in half.

“This past Saturday evening, Kim noticed that the operation of one window on the third floor is also now affected by the sinkholes, he wrote. “This is not the ordinary settling of a building. For a hundred years, the worst thing that happened to our façade was that (a local architecture firm) made it ugly.

“In 2006, it took $60,000 to restore the historic façade, and now we need to hire a structural engineer and begin extensive repairs because, after seven months, you can’t figure out how to stop the heavy-weight traffic and fix the street,” wrote Hoffman, who in the past has criticized the city for other matters, including its failure to keep promises to do more to promote the city’s attempts to create a thriving downtown arts district
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“Each truck and bus that you permit to pass through this block of Pike St. is permanently damaging the 19th Century buildings that line the street,” Hoffman wrote.

Hoffman’s email prompted city Commissioner Jordan Huizenga to suggest asking TANK to reroute its buses, noting, “I think it would be in the City’s best interests to do something in the interim to stop more damage from happening.”

Huizenga later told Hoffman that TANK would, indeed, be rerouting the buses.

“Here comes the bus,” Hoffman said recently as a TANK vehicle approached. “When there’s no cars parked here, they floor it and hit this corner (of the concrete slab above the sinkhole), and it goes full up, and full down.”

While it doesn’t feel significant at street level, the vibrations are stronger on the third floor of his building, he said. He estimates vehicles rock the large concrete panel 10-15 times an hour half the day, and on average five times an hour the rest.

“If you’re on the third floor, it kind of feels like the furnace exploded on the first floor,” he said.

In about 2010, a water main broke nearby and filled basements with several feet of water that left behind several inches of mud. Hoffman wonders whether the mud that was washed out from under the street ever was replaced.

Then in 2013, basements flooded, this time from a sewer. In October, another heavy rain caused the slab to partially collapse into the street.

Yeager in an interview with the Tribune, explained work to resolve the problem is starting only now because, “We didn’t have our annual concrete maintenance contractor on board yet, and there was an investigation that needed to be done with the Sanitation District to figure out what’s going on,” followed by coordinating with the nearby Mutual Building’s management to figure out whether their private sewer lateral was involved.

The city is handling the work rather than Sanitation District No. 1, because “SD1 does not take care of private lateral issues,” he said.

Other than Hoffman, “I have not heard a word out of anybody,” Yeager said. Other nearby owners did not respond to requests for comment.

“We’ve been working on it, but it hasn’t been completed yet,” he said. “And then we’ve got 45 other laterals that we’re dealing with also, so we’re working on them.”

City crews months ago used asphalt to temporarily patch the area beneath the road, “and we were hoping it would kind of extend the time we had to get it fixed,” Yeager said. But then, “it’s settled some more, and that’s the reason we’re going ahead and doing the permanent fix now,” he said.

“It’s really not a prime truck route, so the bigger issue is really TANK,” said Yeager, who predicted the work will take “a day” to complete sometime the week of June 8.

Yeager said he did not believe the sidewalk and building cracks were caused by the sinkhole’s slab knocking about, “but I don’t know that for sure,” he said.

“By June 12 we’ll be done,” he promised.