NATCHEZ — City crews are working to repair two large sinkholes that have opened up under Cemetery Road.

The holes, which are located just before Cemetery Roads’ junction with Marblestone Road, opened over the weekend within a few feet of each other.

The first hole is approximately 6 feet long and 3 feet wide, and between 3 and 3.5 feet deep, Public Works Supervisors Justin Dollar said.

The second hole is approximately 15 feet long and 3 feet wide, and is between 1.5 and 2 feet deep, he said.

The holes formed along the trench that was originally dug for a sewer line, and the issue is because of the long-term settling of soil where the trench was dug, Dollar said.

“We did a smoke test on the sewer line and also ran a camera on the sewer line to see if we could find any faults of breaks in the line or a separation of the joints,” he said. “This was just a compaction issue where the trench was dug.”

Alderwoman Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis said she has received several calls about the problem, which is requiring traffic to be directed onto the left shoulder of the road.

“Because the line wasn’t ruptured, they’re just going to fill that hole with floatable fill, which will float into all those exposed cavities with that sewage line,” Mathis said. “Then they’ll cover it with rocks to let it all settle and watch it, and in a few weeks when it is not raining and we know we are not going to have any more breaks in there, they are going to go back and do an asphalt patch.”

Though these sinkholes were discovered before they could get deeper, Natchez’s soft loess soil has a history of forming sinkholes, including one in 1993 that pulled a house on State Street into a bayou, a 25-foot crater that formed on U.S. 84 near the Mississippi River Bridge in 1999 and the 15-foot wide, 25-foot deep chasm that formed on John R. Junkin Drive near Merit Health Natchez in 2014.