The latest misadventure of Metra Industries, the Little Falls company doing the sewer work in Long Branch, ended up with the flooding and closing of City Hall.

The mess and damage created are just the most recent problems the city has experienced while Metra attempts to fulfill its contract to revamp the city’s sewer system.

The question city officials — most specifically officials with the city’s sewerage authority, which hired Metra — must answer is: When do all the problems associated with the work become large enough to question the contractor’s ability to do the job?

Over the last few months Metra has been cited for the creation of a huge dirt mound in a Fifth Avenue neighborhood that it was ordered to remove, and for illegally pumping water from Lake Takanasee. Those large problems go beyond more routine issues, such as breaking the lines of other utilities, particularly New Jersey Natural Gas.

One such break forced the evacuation of the Gregory School. Such mishaps have occurred all too frequently.

Its failure to properly coordinate its work with the gas company and other utilities, while keeping the gas company’s repair crews fairly busy, has created delays in the project’s timeline.

One unnerving result of the project delays and disruptions is the condition of roads that get torn up and remain as rough as the surface of the moon, without explanation or apology for weeks on end as to why they haven’t been repaved.

The authority’s commissioners and the city’s elected officials have remained relatively silent while all this has happened.

That should raise concern. City residents need to know that someone is watching what Metra is doing and making sure that whatever costs are associated with the problems the company creates are not being passed on to the sewerage authority.

As of now, there has been little official expression of dissatisfaction with Metra’s work. Residents should question why.

Large projects such as restoring the city’s sewer system cannot be expected to go off without a hitch, but at some point officials have to recognize when the problems have risen beyond the routine.

If the sewerage authority commissioners are not prepared to address the issue, elected officials should be.