Sinkhole develops on the Southwest side of South Bend

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Residents of the neighborhood at South Carlisle St. and West Indiana Avenue in South Bend were stunned tonight when a large, round sinkhole appeared in the middle of their street.

Road crews have cordoned off the sinkhole but warn that repairs cannot start until the morning. Initially, residents initially circled it with trash cans to keep people from driving across it, while they called for assistance. 

Resident Cynthia Adams wants community leaders to come take a look at her neighborhood "Everybody, just come out to the communities and just look and see what's going on in the communities because we shouldn't have to deal with sinkholes. We shouldn't have to deal with foul water odors in the communities of what's going on. Bad streets. Y'all keep tearing up the streets, and y'all keep working on the same streets. It's other streets that need to be worked on, not the same ones. You're tearing up. We're paying y'all to do this, but y'all keep working on the same streets. It's other streets that need to be repaired, and this is one of them.

They was running over it because they didn't know. They just thought it was a dip in the street, and I and see, and that's another thing. Us as being drivers, when we see little dips in the streets, we gotta be very careful, and we have to be cautious because we never know when we ride over a sinkhole, that we actually can fall in the sinkhole, being in a vehicle, you can fall forward into it, and we never know.

Small hole, to now it's a big hole, and it's a sinkhole, and it's a problem. And then that barricade they got up there, that's that. I don't think that's going to be sufficient enough."

Komaneach Wheeler told us how they came home to the sinkhole near their home, "Well, on our way to church this evening, we went over it like any normal day, and we felt a bump. We've been living on the street over the past eight and a half years, so it was it was very unusual. When we came back home, we noticed our neighbors had tried to barricade it so when nobody gets through, for safety, with trash cans. So, I walked down to see what was going on and noticed that it was a sinkhole.

You couldn't really see it, so it wasn't like the street was standing up. It was just an unusual bump if you rolled over it, and we never felt it before. It was kind of different. 

Yes, we very concerned. We also concerned about smells of water in our homes. Some of our homes had water pushed through registers, so we're not for sure if this is just a constant underground water problem that's flowing under the houses that has no basement. I would like to ask for our council member of our district to start paying more attention to their district instead of arguing amongst the city all the time because it's a lot of issues that needs more attention, other than all the arguing and bickering that we see within the community."