After months of fundraising, the Wolf Creek Lane community in Ararat repaired its unsafe and sometimes impassable road.
Jill Terry, who lives along the roadway, said the project was $20,000.
“We had a couple of good donations, and then the rest of us just put the money together and fixed it,” she said.
The Ararat Ruritan Club and Hunter’s Chapel Church each donated $1,000 to help the repair effort.
Construction began in late December and continued through January. In addition to fixing a sink hole on the right-hand side of the road, a cement culvert was installed across the roadway. The culvert replaced a previous metal culvert that was giving way under the weight of the road and traffic.
Terry said the top of the road also will be covered in gravel.
“I think they’re kind of waiting on this gravel to see if this is going to sink at all a little bit, and that way, they can fill it in. Everyone’s kind of complaining about the rock pile sitting there, because we’re still down to one lane because” of it, she said.
During the construction Terry said there was no phone or internet service for about a month because the company had to cut the phonelines to work.
“The guys aren’t fully finished. They’ve still got to come back and seed, and then figure out the gravel and all that,” but the road is passable “now so it’s safe,” she said.
Before the road was fixed, Terry said her parents broached the problem with some officials.
“They were told fire trucks could not come over here because they would cave it in, and ambulances couldn’t come up either,” she said.
Because of the road damage, Terry said EMS vehicles, garbage trucks, or United Postal Service (UPS) vehicles would not drive on the road.
Now, “everyone can get through. Our trash truck can come up here now, so we don’t have to have a dumpster. That’s the nice thing. We don’t have to bring our trash all the way down to the end of the road,” she said.
Terry said contractors believe the road should be good for another 30-40 years at least.
“We may have some problems with wash out, but that unfortunately is the way of the water. We’ll have to continue keeping up with that” by maybe adding more rocks to the area, she said.
To help with any future issues, Terry said the neighborhood created a property owner’s association (POA) called Wolf Creek Lane Inc. Under the POA, every property has to pay $100 into a general fund for any road maintenance that needs to be done. “We’re kind of hoping to have that built up a little bit more and then hopefully we can take care of some of the stuff that needs to be done on whole road,” she said.
Terry said this is not the community’s first time repairing the road. All total, she estimated residents spent more than $30,000. The community also wants to pave the road, but currently, that is cost-prohibitive.
Because Wolf Creek Lane is not on the Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) state system of public roads, general maintenance, repairs are the responsibility of residents. Because of this, Terry and others want VDOT to take over the road.
“We don’t know that they will, even though we built this exactly how they said it needed to be done. So now, it’s in their laps,” she said.
Terry said the road repairs have brought a sense of comfort to the community. “If anybody has an emergency up here, they don’t have to worry because we know that they can get to us. That was the main thing was getting this fixed so we can get help,” she said.
“We all feel a lot better, and it’s a lot safer. We can drive over everything and no problems,” she said.
