Rosenort residents baffled by rural route sinkhole

The small farming community of Rosenort has been grappling with chaos on a rural road. CTV’s Joseph Bernacki reports.

A massive sinkhole in a Manitoba community is causing issues for residents and drivers.

Lonnie Friesen and his wife live just off of Pleasant Valley Road in Rosenort. A slight depression cropped up just down the street from where he lives, and the road quickly turned into a full cave-in.

“I’ve never seen this happen in my life before, but obviously the power of water is very, very considerable, and it can do things that I would not have guessed,” Friesen said.

Water levels on the nearby Morris River have caused a culvert to collapse, and the hole keeps getting bigger.

“You can hear the chunks of dirt falling into the water,” Friesen said.

“You can hear it from 100 or 200 feet away.”

The roadside disaster is catching the eye of drivers going by. The RM of Morris Council met Wednesday morning to talk about what to do and try to understand what happened.

“Something happened to the culvert because you can see there’s two or three different whirlpools in here,” said Mervin Dueck, deputy reeve for the RM of Morris.

“That’s definitely indication of culvert failure.”

Dueck says the province said the road falls under municipal jurisdiction and the cost is on them.

“This could easily become a $1 million project by the time everything is said and done.”

The province confirmed to CTV News that the municipality is on the hook and fisheries may be involved.

Friesen said two neighbours on the other side of Pleasant Valley Road could be cut off from an alternate route around the sinkhole if there is a lot of rain.

“If we have any kind of substantial rains, that low level is underwater,” Friesen said.

“The people caught between this cut and the low-level crossing have no way to access their property if it gets muddy.”

Dueck said the water will need to be drained before any work can even be started, and that could take months.