La Crosse’s East Ave. endangered by washout, emergency declared

Fallen storm sewer pipes led to massive erosion problem

It’s hard to even describe how perilously close La Crosse’s East Ave. is to falling into the Mississippi River. 

It took one busted storm sewer line to cause a massive erosion problem and chew away yards and yards of city dirt.

“So you’ve got this pipe in the way and you have got more water coming down,” La Crosse water utility manager Mark Johnson said at a council meeting Monday evening. “It was really almost like a mixer. So, you’ve got all this turbulence and it just ate away the bank and the pipes continue to fall.”

Johnson did his best to paint a picture for the city’s public works board about how massive rains and a broken concrete pipe led to a quickly eroding riverbank over the past week, moving vast chunks of La Crosse land downstream.

The public works board has declared an emergency for the area, making the process of funding quick repairs easier. So far, between $25,000-30,000 has been allocated to the problem.

It started happening last week near East Ave. on the south side and the rate of erosion got alarming pretty quick.

“It’s kind of a combination of things,” Johnson said. “It’s just amazing how much water runs down that pipe.

“It’s kind of in retrospect, this is one of these ask for forgiveness things, but we had to do something.”