LAKE COUNTY, Fla. – As Lake County elected leaders mull the work it will take to repair roads damaged by recent flooding, News 6 has been hearing from viewers who have concerns about the long-term stability of Wolf Branch Road.
“This never was a problem,” George Fuller, who lives in the area, said. “This is the first time ever in 12 months we’ve had this go on twice.”
News 6’s Mark Lehman spoke to Fuller just feet away from a portion of Wolf Branch Road that collapsed--about a year after the road washed out from Hurricane Milton.
“We need to do a better job of thinking through engineering, and water, and retention ponds, depth of retention ponds,” Fuller said.
[BELOW: Drone footage shows damage in Lake County]
During a regularly scheduled Lake County Commission meeting Tuesday morning, commissioners addressed the damage.
“As everyone knows, Wolf Branch Road blew out again,” Lake County Commission Chairwoman Leslie Campione said at the outset of the meeting.
A county employee said during the meeting that the county is looking at what needs to be done to “stabilize” that area of Wolf Branch Road to ensure nothing like this happens again.
“We do want to get it open quickly,” the employee said. “However, we are looking at long-term fixes that can stabilize that entire section, so we don’t have it compromised every time there’s a large rain event.”
News 6’s Mike Valente caught up with Campione several hours later to ask about residents’ concerns and frustrations that the road has now washed out twice a year apart.
[BELOW: Washed-out major roads shut down indefinitely in Lake County]
“I understand it a lot because I actually have been immersed in sort of, ‘What are the causes? Why did this happen last time? Why did this happen again?’” Campione said.
Campione then mentioned a nursery that is upstream on Britt Road.
“They have a lot of runoff that comes from that nursery,” she explained. “And so they were trying to pump their water and create some additional storage, but they could not pump it fast enough.”
Campione said that the county’s plan is to repair the portion of Wolf Branch in order to open it to traffic in about a month. She estimated the cost of the repairs to amount to about $300,000—a similar cost of repairing it a year ago.
Valente then asked whether she believes the repairs made a year ago were sufficient.
[BELOW: Lake County declares state of emergency after cities hit with up to 19 inches of rain]
“We’re kind of answering the same questions over and over again,” she said. “The road was blown out because of runoff that came from a large nursery. We worked with the nursery so that the nursery would make their own improvements, so that they would not have so much runoff.”
Campione added that the county intends to re-design the road, in an effort to prevent a third collapse, but noted that re-designing the road is a much longer-term fix.
“It would probably be something like eight to 12 months and nobody wants that road closed for that long,” she said. “So we will likely make the repair, get the road open while we’re working on the re-design and actually find revenue sources that can be used for that particular infrastructure.”