HOUSTON – One Houston area family says despite numerous repairs, a sinkhole keeps popping up in their front yard and is now threatening their home’s foundation.
The Coligan family who lives on Martin St. said they back in May a sinkhole appeared in their front yard about the size of a basketball, and now it’s about half the size of a sedan.
On top of all that, this isn’t the first or second time the family has dealt with this issue over the years.
“It’s just eating away our yard,” said Maren Coligan, who has lived in her home with her husband James for nine years.
On Tuesday, the family showed KPRC 2 a picture of a small sinkhole that was taken outside of their house two months ago.
“It just gets worse on June 16 and 19. And then here we are today with this massive hole that they came and barricaded and threw a piece of plywood over,” Maren said.
The family said they’ve been forced to deal with this ongoing issue for years.
“Two years ago, following a city stormwater project, we called because we noticed the yard was starting to sink around the manhole,” Maren said.
Throughout the years, the couple said they’ve made numerous calls to 311, and despite what was considered repairs by the city’s Public Works Department, the problem returns worse than before.
“They come and say they’re doing tests, dye tests. They’ll come and dig it up and they just fill it back up with dirt,” James said.
on Tuesday, the city sent us a statement saying they fixed a broken water pipe that runs under the Coligan’s property several times before, and called the problem an aging infrastructure issue.
A spokeswoman for the public works department said that engineers are going to be working to determine if the problem is solely with the water line or if there are other factors.
The Coligans hope they move quickly.
“We went out of town last week and we came back and it was significantly larger,” James said.
“The problem is it rains every day right now, and it literally grows every single day, and in two weeks it could very likely be under our house,” Maren said.
The Coligans said the city promised to have the problem repaired once and for all within two to four weeks. But with their children’s bedroom just about eight feet away from the growing sinkhole, the family wonders if they even have that much time.
