A hole outside Hilda Frank’s Fig Street home in Hollygrove has been filled with sewage for months, and Frank says the smell has become unbearable enough that she now keeps her four-year-old grandchild inside rather than let him breathe it in. Frank, who is undergoing chemotherapy as a breast cancer patient, said the ordeal began in early June and has left her fearing that the standing waste outside her door could make her sick.
Frank told WVUE Fox 8 that the substance pooling in the hole is sewage and waste, and that water collecting there causes the street to flood whenever it rains. She and her neighbors have called the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans multiple times, she said, and at one point endured backed-up toilets inside their own homes. According to the station’s report, crews dug the hole after finding a broken sewage pipe underground, and workers told Frank they would return within a few weeks to fix the pipe and fill it back in. That return never came, per the same account, and the smell resurfaced each time the hole filled back up again after SWBNO occasionally drained it.
A Temporary Fix That Kept Failing
SWBNO crews did install a temporary relief point meant to safely redirect the sewage and protect Frank’s household plumbing while a permanent repair was scheduled, the utility said in a statement to the outlet. The agency said that fix prevented sewage from backing up into her home, but it did not stop the hole outside from refilling or the odor from returning. Neighbor Hayden Robbins, who lives across the street from Frank, said residents in the area often have to file multiple complaints or calls before the utility addresses a problem, and he said the city needs to fix the issue.
In its statement, SWBNO said parts needed for the repair were not readily available when the temporary relief point was first installed, but that the necessary parts are now available. The utility said it takes reports like Frank’s seriously, that it recognizes the disruption the delay has caused her, and that it is working to get an update on the situation. SWBNO also said it is committed to resolving the problem as quickly as possible and told the station that crews intended to make repairs immediately, with work now expected to happen this weekend.
One Hole, Thousands of Open Orders
The delay on Fig Street is not an isolated case. As of August 2026, SWBNO was carrying a citywide backlog of roughly 3,000 open work orders, according to WWL-TV, with the agency aiming to whittle that number down to 1,000 by the end of the year. It is also not the first prolonged sewer complaint out of Hollygrove: in August 2024, residents on another street in the neighborhood endured a two-week gushing manhole leak that sank the asphalt beneath it, a period during which SWBNO officials said non-emergency work orders were taking up to four weeks to resolve…