City awarded $1M hurricane recovery grant
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on August 23, 2018 5:50 AM
The city of Goldsboro has been awarded nearly $1 million in Golden LEAF Foundation grant funds to bolster its Hurricane Matthew recovery efforts.
The $961,307 grant includes $708,000 earmarked for sanitary sewer rehabilitation and $253,307 for stormwater drainage rehabilitation.
"We said recovering from Hurricane Matthew would take many years, and I am pleased that our state and federal governments continue to provide assistance to communities, businesses and individuals," said Scott Stevens, Goldsboro city manager.
"I am appreciative that the city was awarded this funding by the Golden LEAF Foundation, and we will put these funds to work repairing some of our damaged infrastructure."
The sanitary sewer grant -- the larger of the two -- will be used to replace around 3,000 linear feet of 8-inch clay sewer lines and rehabilitate 14 manholes.
The sewer lines extend along West Oak Street, from North Carolina Street to Rockefeller Court, and continue through the woods toward Spruce Street, and between George Street and Alabama Street, from West Oak Street to West Chestnut Street, said Goldsboro Public Works Director Rick Fletcher.
The stormwater rehabilitation grant is intended to replace over 1,532 linear feet of pipe and multiple brick drainage structures, with frame and grate catch basins. The proposed locations for the projects are:
• West Pine Street, from 400 S. George St. to 400 Virginia St.
• East Pine Street, from Center Street to John Street
• Intersection of 1100 Elizabeth St. and Marygold Street
• 400 Beech St., from North Daisy Street to Kornegay Street
Fletcher said the money is a definite boon to the city, but even two years on from Hurricane Matthew, it is still hard to determine the full extent of the damage the storm caused to the city's sewer system.
"We're still finding stuff all the time," Fletcher said. "We'll go to an area we thought was good and suddenly someone will report a sinkhole there, and we'll go look and find out it was damage from Matthew.
"Especially in that part of the city, that's an old part of the city, and when you have that much water going through pipes like that all at once, it causes damage."
Taking care of issues with sewer pipes can take a long time, Fletcher said. Being underground naturally makes the pipes difficult to inspect, and wear and tear often isn't apparent until it causes some kind of appreciable impact on the surface -- such as a sinkhole.
Whether they were the direct result of Hurricane Matthew or if the storm was just "the straw the broke the camel's back," Fletcher said sinkholes have been a problem since the 2016 hurricane.
"We actually just broke ground on a project over on Glenwood Trail, people were having sinkholes appear in their backyards that were sometimes 7, 8 feet wide and 5 or 6 feet deep because of a pipe over there," he said.
Between project development, bidding and selection, the project took about a year to get started, Fletcher said, so it may be some time before the new grant money is actually put to use.