The repair of the worst of the Webster Parish roads washed out by recent flooding is nearly complete, and officials say repair on the rest of the roads will soon begin.
Webster Parish Police Jury Road Committee Chairman Steve Ramsey says Old Arcadia is the last of the parish roads to be repaired, and they hope it will be complete by late Wednesday.
“Old Arcadia is the last one and everything should be passable now,” he said. “Everything is just a temporary fix until the Federal Emergency Management Agency can come and look at it. Hopefully we’ll get some money to come back and repair it the way it should be.”
The plan was to have Old Arcadia Road completed Tuesday but they did not have quite enough fill dirt, he said. He says they were returning Wednesday morning to complete the job and lay rock over it. All of this depends on the weather, he said.
Road crews have repaired Methodist Camp Road after the road was washed away during the recent flooding.
With chances of rain in the forecast for Wednesday and Thursday, it could hamper the road crews’ efforts to complete the repair, but Ramsey assured the work they’ve done will not wash away.
Ramsey says dump trucks from north Webster Parish were brought in to help expedite the hauling of fill dirt and the materials needed to fix the road.
“We had all of our trucks working to get this one going,” he said.
In a special meeting of the police jury in the days following the flooding, Road Superintendent Teddy Holloway estimated more than $1 million in damage to the roads.
“All the crews have been doing is working on damaged roads,” Ramsey said. “And now they’ll start working on the sides of the roads where it’s washed out in some places now that we’ve gotten all these fixed.”
There is no timeframe as to when FEMA teams will be in to inspect the roads, but it will likely be a topic of discussion at the next road committee meeting, he said.
The jury’s committees will meet at 9 a.m., Tuesday, April 5, preceding the monthly meeting at 10:30 a.m.
Budgeted for roads this year was $300,000. That money was to go to road repair and the priority list the road crew would focus on for 2016; however, since the flooding, the jury agreed to use all of the road funds to make immediate repairs to water-damaged roads.