Sinkhole! This One is Close, TOO CLOSE

  

When TV News Helicopters hover right outside your door, you know something is up.  Before we left for our summer travels, we heard a helicopter outside hovering in the distance, and found out they were covering a sinkhole incident about a mile from where we live…  That was on the other side of a lake where sinkholes seem to be more common.  Today, as we were driving back from various things and getting close to home, we see a helicopter which seems to be nearly over our condo complex.  We get home, get on the Internet, and sure enough, another sinkhole….but this one is within 800 feet of our front door!  YIKES!!

    

This is the street we live on.  The green arrow in the picture at the left is our condo.  Turning 180 degrees I point the camera at the swimming pool, and the red arrow is the approximate location of the sinkhole.  It is across the road which typically runs along the front of the condo, on the other side of the pool and the brick wall which separates the road and general public from the condo. 

Did you catch the phrase “road which typically runs….”, that is because the road has been under construction since before we got back from our summer trip.  The county is running new sewer lines, and installing a pump station, right along this entrance street.  The pool is just to the right of that large Excavator Tractor, while the sink hole is on the other side of the brown fence to the left of the tractor.  Over the past week, the amount of water they have been pumping out has increased ten fold.

This is as close as they would let me get.  The green line is pointing to where the pool is, the red line is pointing to where the sinkhole is.  Yes, it really is less than 800 feet from our front door….DOUBLE YIKES!!!!!

    

Here are a few news photos of the car which has been swallowed up by the sinkhole, I mean, “depression”.  Since the county is having work done so close by, they refuse to let it be called a sinkhole for now.  By tomorrow, I doubt they will have a choice.  Does it look like the car is settling down into the hole?  Well, you would be correct -- the late-night news reported the following: “The car is totally inside the hole now, which is getting deeper, but not wider."  Reports said that at 10:45 this morning the “depression” was first noticed, and within 15 minutes, the car had collapsed into the hole.  From there on, the sinkhole has slowly gotten deeper and deeper….. as more and more water is being pumped out by the construction crew nearby.  One theory is that the construction crew hit a shallow aquifer, and the water in the aquifer was holding up the ground over the car.  

Tomorrow is another day, let’s just hope it does not produce another sinkhole.