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VIDALIA, La. — When Patrick Landers tries to shut the door to his house at 314 Elm Street, he has to pull it a little harder than normal for the latch to click.

The same is true for his neighbor Dinah Sparks, who lives just across Concordia Avenue from him. Sparks said she also has to force her windows closed and notices cracks crawling across her walls and ceiling.

While this can be the case of older homes as their foundation settles over time, Sparks said she has only noticed the cracks in the last two months, and only on the side of the house closest to a giant sinkhole at Elm Street and Concordia Avenue.

She has lived in the home for nearly two years, she said.

Just down the street, water shoots up like a spring from the concrete, an everyday occurrence on Concordia Avenue, she said.

The sinkhole that stretches all the way across Elm Street and takes up at least half of the width of Concordia Avenue has gotten noticeably worse since it started to form near the end of March and into early April.

“It started out as just a dip over the street, and a week later, it was a little hole,” Sparks said. “By the first week of April, that’s when we realized it was sinking. … It didn’t start out all the way across Elm.”

Sparks said she has not bothered to report the cracks to her home insurer, out of fear that they would drop her insurance.

“I grew up in New Orleans and experienced that, where the insurance can just drop you for no reason at all,” she said.

While unable to repair the sinkhole until the groundwater dries up, the town has placed a pump on Elm Street to speed up the process of drying and slow down the sinking.

Although the sinkhole has grown large enough to swallow the edge of Landers’ driveway, both he and Sparks said drivers have still tried to cut through their yard to get around the barricades, making the sinkhole worse.

“I’ve had tire tracks going across my yard from people trying to come up Elm Street,” Landers said. “Mayor Buz Craft has told us that he’s going to put our yard back the way it was but the problem is you have to wait for it to dry up before you can do anything. The (Mississippi) river has to go down X number of feet. I’ve heard several different measurements, so I’m not sure what, but they keep saying it has to go down, then they’ll come in and they’ll excavate it.”

Having lived there since 1992, Landers said the house was freshly rebuilt two years ago after a fire burned it up in 2023.

Just a few months after moving back in, the sinkhole issue started, he said.

However, he tries not to worry too much.

“You can only worry so much. Otherwise, you’ll just get sick from worry,” he said. “My number one concern is just getting it (fixed) and how long it’s going to take to start.”