Traffic travels south on the east side of South Center Street near McIntyre Funeral Home. Mount Olive has received a $1 million grant for drainage projects designed to mitigate flooding in that area. The project includes replacing a 30-inch drainage line under the railroad bed with a 48-inch one, adding a new trunk line on Kornegay Street and dredging ditches. Work is expected to begin next September and is expected to be completed around 2025-2026.(Steve Herring|mountolivetribune.com)
Within the coming year, residents in the southern end of Mount Olive will have to endure street closures and detours as the town undertakes two long-anticipated projects to improve drainage in the area often left flooded following heavy rains.
The trade-off, hopefully, will be years of satisfaction out of the projects and a hope that the town will never again get into the shape it is now, Town Manager Jammie Royall said.
The project startup meeting was held two weeks ago.
“So we’re going to have a lot of construction going on here soon and probably a lot of streets that you’re going to be detoured so you have to go different ways for a short time,” Royall pointed out. “We’re probably looking to get started around September of next year.”
The drainage work is expected to be completed around 2025-2026.
Contributing to the flooding on the south side of town is the raised railroad bed that acts almost like a dam, preventing rainwater from draining properly.
“The last couple of hurricanes we had it seemed like it has gotten worse,” Royall stressed. “We flooded down there. We had about about four or five homes that just completely flooded out, people had to leave.”
Mount Olive has received a $1 million grant to do the work.
“Well, again, like I say, you know the way grants and stuff work, they don’t work as fast as everybody wants them to,” Royall said. “We did manage to get that $1 million grant thanks to AECOM Engineers. That one is for right at a million dollars.
“But what they are proposing to do is go through under the tracks. We’ve got a 30-inch pipe under the track now. So we’re going to change that to a 48-inch and then they are going to run a trunk line out Kornegay Street on out so that it will handle more water.”
That trunk line will complement an existing one that runs down Maple Street to Breazeale Avenue. A trunk line is a main line that drains away water, Royall said.
“So we had a 15-inch there (Maple Street), and we raised that up to a 24 -inch,” he said. “Now we’re going to put another 24-inch pipe on Kornegay Street.
“We’re hoping that is going to relieve a lot of the flooding in that area.” The new line under the tracks will be located near McIntyre Funeral Home (the old Perry Hall grocery store) and the old Mount Olive plywood plant on South Center Street.
Also, the town is going to dredge town-owned ditches on Nelson Street to improve drainage flow.
“The thing with a ditch is whenever they dig a ditch they leave them with a clay bottom in them, and you want to be careful when you do dig them out not to get below that,” Royall said.
