Wow that thing is HUGE!!! I know I heard 200+ ft. wide but was I mistaken when I heard 80 ft. DEEP?
I felt really bad for the people whose house is teetering on the edge! Watching the planters from their patio tumble into a giant hole while the rest of their home waits to follow... :(
Are sinkholes caused by the collapse of underground rivers or caves or both?
Either way - SCARY!!!

Erm, Z lives in Lakeland!

OH Ziroc.....uh.. tell us your house is not on the edge of that thing! :eek:

As I understand it, the ground below the sinkhole has eroded, washed away, or otherwise disappeared. But definitely scary...

I'd be packing up the unimportant stuff in the house right now. The important stuff would already be gone...

Pfff, Well thats just GREAT, the local news hasn't covered it yet. WONDERFUL! [img]smile.gif[/img]

Yeah, after the 4 hurricanes last year, we had like 60 of them all over the state--small mainly. They fill them with rock and dirt.

Florida IS sinking itself btw. Slow, but sinking. A small stripmall had a sinkhole open behind it, and half of the stores backs fell into it, it's fixed now, but that was 1.4 miles from us. We're on good land though. No aquifers under us.

For a second there, I though Violet was calling Lakeland FL a sinkhole. :D

Stratos LOL! [img]tongue.gif[/img]
It's good to know they have ways to fill them at least!
I wonder how we got the footage in AZ and your local news didn't show it? Someone in Tucson must have relatives there. [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

<font color=skyblue>I remember seeing one in Mexico for the first time ever, and walking up to it to gaze down into it. It was so freaking deep. This was in Mexicali, and El Niño had just hit us.

So I am stannding there, looking down into it, and then realize something terrible. There was no wall under my feet, and I was standing on about a foot of dirt that was not being held up by anything under it. The shiver that went down my spine was intense. I backed away really carefully. I don't ever want to see one ever again!</font>

Small ones open up in our fields all the time, but that's because we live near the Ohio River, and our aquifer is fairly shallow. Just fill them with rocks, though, and they're fixed.

Ours never get 80 feet deep, though. Durn.

That's a big doggone sinkhole!

Violet, Can you give a link to the story?

Dang Larry_OHF! Did you have to change into dry undies after that? I think I would have wet myself LOL! I don't blame you for not wanting to see another!

Ilander
Yeah I thought 80ft deep is pretty impressive but I am still not sure if 80ft was the depth or the width in the direction opposite of the 200+. The person video taping the hole and the planters falling off the edge of the homeowner's patio didn't get too close to the edge (I don't wonder why LOL).

The University of Central Florida has a Sinkhole Research Instiute. They have a photo on their "Mission" page of one in Winter Park that is 300 feet in diameter and 110 ft deep! Now, that's a bigazz hole LOL!
http://www.cee.ucf.edu/RESEARCH/fsri/

VulcanRider,
I have no link - I saw it on the news last night KGUN9 and I think (not positive) it was during the end of the weather report if you want to contact Paul Huttner for info on where he (or the station) got the video. http://www.kgun9.com/news/ or http://www.paulhuttner.com/ Must be some weather guy - has his own web site [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

As soon as I hit the reply button I realized that I may have been watching KOLD http://www.kold.com/ or even KVOA http://www.kvoa.com/ the harder I try to remember what local ststion I hadthe TV on, the fuzzier my memory gets LOL!
KGUN is the norm but I know I had some CBS something or another on while I was playing video games last night.

[ 03-04-2005, 06:40 PM: Message edited by: Violet ]