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I was watching a doco on the relocaion of an entire town because they had mined the iron ore to such an extent that there was a mile deep cavern beneath it and it was falling in.
Does anyone here live near such subsidence or Sinkholes? I know there is some hollow region at the far east end of the ironstone rock the city of Darwin is built on - where it becomes te city of Palmerston. They lost a bulldozer in one while clearing to build houses.
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We have had a couple of little ones right in our building complex. Of course, that's because some moron back in the 1970s thought that it would be a good idea to build a college dormitory on top of a swamp.
Every time it rains, the ground shifts, and pipes break, causing parts of the parking lot to sink into the ground. Two weeks ago, a back-hoe that was in the process of digging up a burst water line punched one of its front tires through the pavement and into a 4-foot deep cavity.
So far, though, we haven't had anything major here in Savannah, though I hear farther south, they've had major problems. I heard about an entire school in Florida getting swallowed up due to rising groundwater.
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Oh yeah. They built an entire community on a bunch of coal mines here in Colorado Springs --> Here. Some of them are really nice homes -- pretty much worthless now.
Just the large one in my wallet....
Live in Cornwall and the place is littered with old forgotten mine shafts. A few years ago a women was hanging out some washing to dry and a shft opened up under her. Big fall, lots of death.
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The mountains north of Ticonderoga, New York are also riddled with abandoned mine shafts. Particularly dangerous are the abandoned graphite mines of the unimaginatively-named town of Graphite. A few years back, some kids running from the cops ran into the brush along the side of the road. They were found about a month later, a hundred feet down a mine shaft.
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We get sinkholes here in North Carolina whenever there's been an extended rainy period. The soil is largely composed of red clay, and when it finally erodes, it goes quickly and in big chunks.
Usually, once a year there's a scene of a road or parking lot, or even a building that falls into a sinkhole after a week or two, solid, of rainy days.
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I saw some sinkholes in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico last fall. Truly beautiful. There was one with a restaurant perched on the edge of it. There was a path running around the inside to the swimming hole with places where you could jump in from 20 feet up.
Those are called Cenotes and have been open for years. People use them as natural swimming pools. They are quite beautiful.