Greater Cincinnati Water Works will shut down Madison Road in both directions near Duck Creek Road on July 29, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. to test the floodgate that failed during the July 17 storm.

A spokesperson for the utility confirmed the six-hour closure is for testing purposes. Drivers who use Madison Road through Oakley should plan alternate routes. No specific detour was named in the announcement.

The closure comes 12 days after the Duck Creek floodgate failed to deploy automatically during a storm that dumped five to six inches of rain in roughly one hour on July 17. The resulting floods damaged homes and businesses across Oakley, Hyde Park, and Mount Lookout.

What went wrong on July 17

City Manager Sheryl Long confirmed at a July 24 press conference that the floodgate malfunctioned. The gate, installed in 2008 after being engineered by the Army Corps of Engineers, is supposed to close automatically when Duck Creek reaches an elevation of 540 feet. The city has no record of the water ever reaching that trigger level before July 17.

After the storm, crews tried to replicate the automatic closure by mimicking a high water level. The gate failed again. It still works when an operator manually initiates closure, and the city's Stormwater Management Utility manually shut the gate for about six hours on July 21, ahead of forecast storms.

Greater Cincinnati Water Works Deputy Director Jason Fleming said at the July 24 press conference that the agency is evaluating protocols to operate the gate until full repairs are complete. Long said some replacement parts may need to be sourced from outside the country, and no timeline for restoring automatic operation has been announced.

A 2020 engineering report recommended replacing the Madison Road bridge entirely and eliminating the floodgate, at an estimated cost of $2.3 million to $2.6 million. The city deemed the project infeasible due to cost and impacts on surrounding property and infrastructure.