St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — One end of a fire truck was stuck in pavement up to its axle for about two hours this morning after a street partly collapsed in south St. Louis. It happened before 6 a.m. near 9th and Wyoming, south of the Anheuser-Busch brewery.
The pumper truck and a medic unit had been rushing to the 900 block of Withnell Avenue, for a report of a “person down.” The pumper truck responds routinely with a medic truck on calls like that.
The pumper didn’t make it to scene because it was stuck, but the medic unit got there in a hurry and the person was already dead, said Capt. Garon Mosby of the St. Louis Fire Department. Authorities say it appears the person died of natural causes, and homicide detectives have not been requested.
An inspector with the St. Louis streets department examined the collapse and the pavement surrounding it to decide what the plan should be for getting the truck out. The obvious concern is that the sinkhole will get bigger as crews work to remove the truck.
“Sinkholes, they go small to big,” Mosby said. “We basically have this truck sitting in a hole that’s already started.”
The truck was removed from the hole by 8 a.m.
No one on the fire truck was injured in the incident.Police had no additional details on the person found dead on Withnell.
Most of the time it’s a sewer that fails or a water main, and those utility companies will have to do the repairs. Normally a sewer collapse is the culprit when the hole is deep, said Todd Waelterman, the city’s street director. The gas company shut the gas off in case a gas line has broken, then the truck was removed. Some time these holes take two or three weeks to repair.
Since only the truck’s front tire was stuck, that is the sign of a small hole. Last September, about the same time of morning, “we had a whole trash truck fall in” when a sinkhole opened up in an alley, Waelterman said. “The guy went to go pick up a Dumpster up and the truck fell in six feet. All you could see was the driver’s head.”
The trash truck driver wasn’t hurt. The city ended up excavating the alley and built a road, then drove the truck out of the hole that afternoon.
The trash truck was brand new, $230,000, and had only been on the road about a month or two. In that case, it was an entire sewer main that collapsed at about 6:45 a.m. Sept. 24, in an alley near Blair and Newhouse avenues.
“The hole was as big as your kitchen,” he said. “This hole (on 9th & Wyoming) here is probably the size of a bathroom.”
Waelterman said these things happen in a city with aging infrastructure.
“It’s a failing infrastructure,” Waelterman explained. “We have sewers that are over 100 years old and there are no resources out there to replace them. And the water pipes are just as old. Those two things are reaching the end of their life in many areas.”
With only the front tire (of the fire truck in a hole), it could be just a six-inch pipe known as a sewer lateral, which connects to a sewer main.
The streets department gets “a couple thousand calls a year” in which somebody spots the ground sinking a little bit and suspects a sewer lateral has gone bad.
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