Rice Mine Road sinkhole repair job a month away from being finished

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (WBRC) - It’s slow going, but going nonetheless. We’re talking about the massive sinkhole in Tuscaloosa off Rice Mine Road that’s caused lots of issues for nearly two years.

It continues to be a big mess and has been since construction started back in June 2023.

On Thursday afternoon, we learned that construction crews are more than 50% into the project, and according to Tuscaloosa City Councilman Norm Crow - who represents the area - he is confident the job will be finished by the end of October, if not before.

The sinkhole was caused by crumbling pipes below ground.

“I would say a little better than 50%. We did encounter some problems. We had to get some more pipes and things replaced, so the council passed some additional funding to do that and I believe that delayed the project 30 days. I am pretty confident we’ll have this finished by the end of next month. I do think there were a lot of challenges with this, and it took a lot of time to really figure out what we got to do to fix this,” said Crow.

Councilman Crow says the additional pipes requested by the contractor costs around $100,000, bringing the total repair bill to about $2 million.

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