HOUSTON, Texas — You can expect to find puddles the day after rain showers, but one right outside of Eastex Collision Repair isn’t from the rain.
“This is a typical day for us right here. if you look over here, you can see the water still flowing,” said Eastex Collision Repair general manager Michael Groh.
Groh said about three months ago someone knocked the fire hydrant down, which started a leak that never stopped.
“It just flows all day long, flows down, flows through here,” Groh said.
The sidewalk where the fire hydrant was is now covered in water and dirt.
“You can see all the cracks, the water just pumping up,” he said.
That water is now eroding the business’s driveway.
“We had to put cones up because we were scared that people would drive through, drag a rock out into the narrow road, and then the customer, you know, somebody would hit it,” Groh said.
Groh said they reached out to the city and even the county, but it led nowhere. So, they decided to take the matter into their own hands.
“Because it was just getting so bad that we ended up putting a piece of pipe on it, clamping it down over the top but it's still not stopping the leak,” said Groh.
Groh is worried that if nothing gets done, it’ll get worse.
“This is every morning. It puddles up like this. We try to clean it up, and then it. Just by the end of the day, it does it all over again,” he said. “I'm worried about sinkholes. You know, large trucks drive through here every day, so what if one day a large truck comes in, it's loaded with a car, and it just bursts out from underneath them.”
Monday afternoon, a City of Houston crew isolated the leak to help minimize the amount of water. They said a crew will return Tuesday to begin repairs and restoration will begin in the following days.
Groh said they got an estimate to repair the driveway where the leak eroded the pavement and it's set to cost around $20,000.