This big ol' void space appeared under a house foundation I was digging the other day. Was like the size of a 12m dumptruck bed when we opened it up all the way. Surprised that the hoe didn't fall into it like a sinkhole. We opened it up and it was just a round bowl hole. No obvious entrance or exits for water flows. So I filled it with dirt, packed it down and kept moving before any engineers or building inspectors saw it. What do y'alls think it was? Like a soluble rock that dissolved? A previously raided indigenous graveside?
Holy Smokes.. We have A Lot of that here in SC . Folks buy up “swamp lots”.. no good for anything.. Put a sign by the road that says, free dump site..& before u know it, there are MOUNTAINS of waste concrete, shingles, old bicycles, stumps & trees, you name it.. Fast forward 2-3 months & everything is smoothed out & there’s a FOR SALE sign on the lot. & we all know what happens 5-10 years later.. all that organic material rots, the corners of the Condos sink..(sink hole)
So that's swamp land, huh. Then I guess there's the karst topography with all the limestone deposits In Tennessee and thereabouts, right? I hope that this dude's house doesn't sink. I told him to find a Geotechnical engineer but he said to just fill it in
Wow! Most of the sink holes I’ve seen have been caused by broken pipe storm sewer sanitary sewer water main field tile etc.
Factory I was at years ago was built atop a cavern. The plant floor had some sort of perimeter band of reinforcement. We always expected someday to find the machines in a hole a'la the Corvette museum in KY.
When big pipes rot out.
Someone did a super job of joining some bell & spigot pipe..
Field lok gaskets.
It's hanging in there!
In a mine I was working in, I got a call to the like the 1800 level. Earlier a loaded truck had called and said there was hole forming on the downhill side of the ramp. We closed the road and I arrived with a D10 in about 10 minutes. I stopped uphill from the hole and met the shifter. He's like "check this out." This hole in the road surface was about 1 foot by 1 foot and opened into a void about 30 feet in diameter and 25 feet deep. We had been mining through an old failure to get back to ore bearing material. The material where the hole developed was in very high in clay contact. When we blasted the material contained the energy of the blast and formed this void. we had been running on it for awhile with empties and the spine thinned out enough to create "window" I worked around it with the cat and dropped the roof and we dumped a truck into the hole. Problem solved. Not a spontaneous sinkhole but unusual.
There's a lot of local people telling me it was probably an indigenous grave that had already been raided in the past. That's not a geological formation that happens without a clear flow of water. Hope I didn't anger any Mayan mummies or anything...
No, neither mummies, or daddies.
Does a septic tank count? Joe H
We were doing a small open pit coal mine with dozers years ago. The D9 operator was ripping rock when he felt the back of the machine settle. He said he thought the shank had broke so he looked back and saw the rock falling away from the ground as he lifted the ripper. He dropped the tranny into second and screamed out as fast as the machine would go. The hole that opened would have swallowed the machine backwards. Turns out in the early nineteen hundreds some people would see a little bit of a seam in a rock wall and just dig a tunnel hauling out the coal for home heat as they went. They might have got caught or the coal played out and they stopped mining. Turns out in this case the county put in a road that sealed the entrance and everyone forgot the tunnel was there. That hole caused us some real problems later on.
Yup, found some of those along the way too. That usually the customer getting sort of irritated and jumping up and down in an excitable manner.
I've got an old well on my property that keeps coming back for more. Not sure what to do with it.
That can be a real stinker!
My side of the valley is boulders. You might dig hundreds of feet deep to reach bedrock. Other side, 2 miles away is limestone (calcium carbonate) bedrock. This stuff is water soluble. Every crack in the solid is a water channel. That mountain is full of caves. Morse cave is famous, Falls Cliff Cave you walk through a waterfall as you enter. Purgatory is 80' vertical before you get to horizontal channels. Tallow, you stand up to enter. At face height it is about a foot wide. The walls were lined with bats. I could barely avoid touching them as I entered. The Bat Cave was the most popular. A VIP car dealer took it upon himself to build a barred gate to keep people out. He was a big hero to all the imported liberals. I have no doubt there are other underground voids that haven't yet been opened.
Company i worked for had a limestone quarry every now and then cracks would start opening under the crusher move it then excavate the cracks and open up the hole fill it then shift the crusher back.
Well, none of y'all seem sufficiently scared of that, so let it be me! Yikes! I'd have been very nervous seeing it! Not to mention all the weird Costa Rican environments that would incline me to not trust the ground much regardless... This got me to thinking about the comment @OFF made, as well, and an episode of maybe Dirty Jobs I saw or something, where there are fairly large holes, from mines or wells or who knows what that apparently dot the woods, with no real notice of there being big deep holes. In the episode they basically filled them with an expanding foam product of some sort but made it sound like the holes were all over and potentially a huge safety risk.
Being in an old coal mining region, I've seen plenty of air shafts and sinks that get all the way to the surface. They are generally filled with large rock till they plug and a top cap of gravel covers the top. A survey has to be done anytime someone wants to build above any old mining tunnels. An engineer has to sign off. It would certainly be possible for a person to fall into one of the holes and never be seen again. It hasn't been a problem that I know as I haven't heard of it happening in my lifetime. The spots around hear are Black Diamond, Cougar Mountain above Renton, Landsburg, Ravensdale, Carbonado, Fairfax and Wlikeson. If you want to go bushwhacking in those areas, you better be alert to what is in front of you.
Not exactly a sink hole, and I wish I could remember how deep it was, at the quarry I worked at just about a mile from my house. There was time when they were having a problem with flooding and the "solution" was to drill a hole in the bottom of the pit. I'm guessing that back in the early 1960's when they were getting ready to open this quarry on what had been farm land they had done several core holes to be able to estimate the amount of limestone they could extract. So maybe they knew about the hollow spot from the start. I do recall seeing the water swirling while draining after a bad rain storm at least once. Last I knew they had a section of 4 or 5 inch pipe sticking in the hole that was painted red. Always kind of wondered if some day I would have my well run dry when they blast the next hole. My well is only 180 feet down and the pit at the quarry has to be close to that. But then the layers of lime stone can very quite a bit over a short distance around here, seems while they were forming over the centuries the land was not exactly stable! Some time I should use my GPS that has a setting that will give you elevations above sea level to get an idea of the change in elevation from the front of my property to the top of the hill behind my property where the bed rock is right on the surface!
These holes are all where the mole men live aren't they?