PEA RIDGE — School buses were rerouted and a section of Twelve Corners Road was closed to traffic Friday morning after a large hole was discovered beneath the road bed just west of Dodd Road.
The sinkhole, or erosion hole, was on the north side of Twelve Corners Road just east of Twelve Corners Church. It was discovered Thursday night.
The hole was as deep as 10 feet and extended more than three-fourths of the way beneath the road bed above the decades-old culvert that had been rendered useless by time and decay, according to Jack Brown, county road superintendent.
Shawn Alley, a county employee, stayed on the site all night to warn motorists of the hard-to-see hole.
“If a truck had come across (the hole) carrying that,” Brown said, pointing to the huge excavator, the road would have caved in.
Brown, who has been superintendent for about seven months, said there has been a similar hole off Benton County 74 in Avoca and another on the west side of the county.
“The two most recent floods probably did the most damage to this, although there could have been issues there before,” Brown said.
Crews found the downhill side of the original 30-inch metal culvert was stopped up with debris.
Several county dump trucks with “red dirt” — a mixture of large rocks and red clay — waited in the church parking lot until time to dump in the hole. A pile of gray gravel was dumped in the parking lot for use as well.
Concrete culvert pieces were laid end to end in the newly cleaned out trench after the metal culvert was removed. Gasket pieces were laid in the cracks between pieces, then red dirt and gravel were dumped atop the culvert.
Twelve Corners Road was open to traffic again Friday evening.