A sinkhole and collapsed stormwater pipe on Windsong Way have cracked curbs, buckled the roadbed, and cut off safe driveway access for at least five homes near Old Stone Mountain Road in Tucker, Georgia. City officials have approved more than $220,000 in emergency funding to fix it, with repair crews expected to begin work this week and demolition of the damaged site set to start by the end of the week.
According to 95.5 WSB, Tucker Public Works Director Ishri Sankar said heavy rain likely contributed to the sinkhole and pipe collapse. Sankar said the pipe network had been inspected before the failure and was considered in fair condition, but it degraded very quickly, showing joint separation and allowing water to seep into the roadway and roadbed. The roadway now shows cracking curbs and raised earth beyond the curb line, visible signs of the ground shifting beneath the street.
Separately, Decaturish.com reported that city officials moved quickly on the emergency action because the pipe failure threatened to strand up to six residential properties along the street, underscoring just how narrow the window was between a soggy yard and a blocked driveway. Windsong Way sits in the Smoke Rise area, a wooded residential community bordering Stone Mountain that was originally developed in the 1960s by builder Bill Probst, according to the DeKalb History Center. That places much of the neighborhood's underground drainage network at roughly 50 years old.
Why Aging Pipes Keep Failing Across the Metro
The math on pipe age is not favorable. Corrugated metal stormwater pipes installed during suburban buildouts of the 1960s and 1970s were designed for an expected service life of just 25 years, according to infrastructure planning data cited by the City of Dunwoody, making 40- to 50-year-old networks highly prone to bottom-invert rot and joint separation. Windsong Way's pipe, sitting near that upper age range, appears to fit that pattern.
The timing also follows a recent disruption in the immediate area. On July 17, DeKalb County Watershed Management temporarily shut down an eight-inch water main along Old Stone Mountain Road near Windsong Way to perform emergency pipe repairs, according to the City of Tucker. It is not clear from available records whether that county water main work is connected to the newer stormwater pipe failure, but it shows the corridor has already seen underground strain this summer.
Tucker Took Over Public Works After 2022 Vote
The city's ability to move fast on a $220,000 emergency allocation traces back to a 2022 ballot measure. Tucker voters overwhelmingly approved a public works referendum that November, transferring local road maintenance and stormwater management responsibilities from DeKalb County to the municipality and leading to the launch of Tucker's own Public Works Department in July 2023. In its first full year of operations, from July 2023 to July 2024, that department closed out more than 1,000 work orders, including several hundred backlogged stormwater issues inherited from the county, per official city records.
Tucker outsources day-to-day management of its Public Works Department to private consulting firm Lowe Engineers, LLC, and uses Trimble Cityworks software to map drainage assets and log resident work requests, according to information published by Trimble. To help pay for repairs like the one on Windsong Way, the Tucker City Council voted in June 2025 to raise the city's monthly residential stormwater utility fee from $6 to $8 per Equivalent Residential Unit starting in the current fiscal year, a change expected to generate roughly $1 million annually in dedicated revenue for backlog pipe repairs, per Rough Draft Atlanta.
Steel Plates and a Local Contractor on Standby
Because Windsong Way is a public right-of-way, the repair falls squarely on the city rather than individual homeowners. Under DeKalb County and municipal Georgia policy, local governments are only responsible for stormwater infrastructure within public rights-of-way or dedicated public drainage easements, leaving private landowners on the hook for failures on their own property, according to reporting from WSB Radio. That distinction is why the $220,000 allocation could move forward as city-funded emergency work.
In the meantime, the city plans to place steel plates over the damaged section so residents can still reach their homes while demolition and replacement get underway. Tucker frequently turns to CaJenn Construction & Rehabilitation Services Inc., a Tucker-based on-call contractor known for trenchless pipe lining, joint repair, and sinkhole remediation, for this kind of emergency work, according to city meeting records. It remains unclear how quickly full street resurfacing can be completed once the new pipe is in place, or whether ground loss extends onto any adjacent private property lines.
