Rain from recent hurricane remnants wreaking havoc on Valley roads
PHOENIX (KSAZ) -- It's been an unusually rainy month. In fact, it's the wettest October on record in Phoenix, and rain is back in the forecast this weekend.
All this rain is wreaking havoc on roads around the Valley. A lot of potholes have formed, and even a couple of sinkholes have opened up. On Friday, crews are working on fixing one sinkhole on 43rd Avenue and Glenrosa, near Grand Canyon University. Thankfully, the road isn't completely closed, but traffic was moving pretty slowly, as half of the lanes were blocked off.
The sinkhole on 43rd Avenue and Glenrosa came, just weeks after another one on 35th Avenue and Cactus Road that shut down the intersection for two weeks. Small businesses direly impacted.
"Really tough for us, but what can we do?" said the owner of Rocket Burgers, Ruth Green. She said those two weeks were agonizingly long, and she lost 50% of her customer base.
"We're not closed, we're still open," said Green. "Only thing is it impact us, because our sales went down big time."
Friday was the first day Green sees customers return.
"I saw it on Facebook that they were fixing it, so now we're back," said one customer.
Meanwhile, the City of Phoenix Street Transportation Department says those several weeks could have turned into months if they had to get a new pipe.
"We were very fortunate that we were able to find the materials to be able to repair the storm drain as quickly as we did," said City of Phoenix Deputy Street Transportation Director Mark Glock. "If we were to have to wait for the concrete pipe, we could've waited up to four months."
Street Transportation officials, however, now have two more major road repairs to worry about.
"We have another sinkhole that has developed. We're also on Broadway Road, just east of 40th Street. It wasn't a sinkhole, it was more of a dip in the road," said Glock.
Right now, city officials say most of the potholes have been fixed, and these two repairs should be completed by the end of next week.
City officials also say they were actually below the yearly average of about 30,000 potholes earlier this year, because of a weak monsoon season. However, the remnants of the recent hurricanes have now put them closer to that average number, and with more rain expected, they expect to stay quite busy for a while.