Sewer pipe collapse repair will shut down part of State Street

Other old pipes in city not necessarily at risk.

The collapse of, maybe, a century-old sewer pipe will shut down a street in downtown La Crosse starting today.

Part of State St. at Front St. will remain closed for a couple of weeks while crews fix the old concrete main.

Costs for the repair are in the tens of thousands of dollars.

The problem now is they don’t know fully what they’re getting into until the digging starts, says water utility manager Mark Johnson.

“We need to know more as we dig down to it – the groundwater part of it,” Johnson said. “Just to complicate things, of course, there’s other utilities that are in the vicinity, crossing the pipe and we know we also have groundwater.”

Johnson added that while the problem was identified several days ago, the project was delayed to not complicate downtown travel for crowds visiting for the state track meet last weekend.  

“We found that there was deterioration (several days ago),” Johnson said. ” We were actually thinking it’s a really straight forward lining project – it’s only a little over 100 feet, no service connections and a really good candidate for lining. 

“The failure happened before we could do that.”

Johnson says something – possibly high groundwater levels – increased the rate of deterioration in the pipe beyond expectations.  

While the pipe is possibly 100 years old, it’s not a sign of things to come from other similar pipes in the city, according to Johnson.

“We have concrete pipe in the city that’s in really good shape,” he said.

The repair could take a couple of weeks, depending on what crews find when they start digging.

Riverside park will remain open during the repair.