5/4/2004: Sinkhole eats car
 

http://cellar.org/2004/sinkholeeatscar.jpg

Yes, it's true; sometimes a sinkhole will just come up and eat a car.

I have the whole series of pics of this thing sinking (I'm fairly sure it's this car), should I put them up?

Go ahead!

There, but for the grace of God, goes my car.

Why don't things like this ever happen to my car. I could do with a new one, and I'm sure the Insurance Company would agree after seeing it at the bottom of the pit. :rolleyes:

Its a hole that forms under the ground above which the ground appears undisturbed. Then, the hole gets so large, its cover caves in revealing the hole. Usually, they are formed by underground erosion by water. Potholes are mini-sinkholes.

In certain parts of the world, they open up into old, unmapped mine shafts...

IIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!

This reminds me of a scene from "10.5"...

One has to wonder why there is something resembling a fitting for a drainage section in the bottom of the hole.

That hole has been most likely been caused by a water pipe bursting and washing away the soil around the pipe .. but if you knew the number of potential sinkholes, caused by unstable geology, abandoned unknown mines, and oil extraction .. you'd never drive on any U.S. road or highway. :(

http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/julaug99/minehole.htm

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/mine/kansas02.htm

Oy
 

No one was driving when this happened, I hope
I have to agree with leah, I could use a car too, one with an onstar system that could alert me of these things:biggrin:

Re: Oy
 

So that would be one Hummer H2 with ground penetrating radar and underbody airbags. Anything else?:typing:

Pennsylvania is extremely good at sinkholes. Much of the southeastern portion of the state is Karst Topography. The whole area is underlain by limestone. Mild acids in underground water react with the limestone and it basically just fizzes away, albeit slowly. Eventually there isn't anything supporting the soil and the whole thing just drops. (my undergraduate degree is in Geography and Planning. We were all over this geomorphology stuff.)

One disrupted the expansion of route 202 at King of Prussia. They had to fill it first. The relevant article is about 2/3 of the way down the page, headined "Massive Highway Improvements Garner Governor's Praise." It notes that they had to pump 1.4 million cubic FEET of pressure injected grout into the holes. That's a lot of freaking grout. They had to build a grout manufacturing plant at the site, I believe.

ode to a sinkhole
 

To richlevy

I want one of those tv's in the car too, so while I am waiting to be rescued I can watch some movies
While you are taking orders.....a side order of fries, and a coke to go with that:p

Why don't they use landfill? 2 birds, 1 stone.:blunt:

1.4 Million cubic feet.

Let's see, that's a cube that's 112 feet wide, by 112 feet tall, by 112 feet long.

What can I compare that to? Um, I bet the White House is roughly the same size. That's enough grout to fill the White House. There you go.

This sink hole happened at the entrance to a mall in Baltimore. See:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/loc...ocal-headlines

The road and pipes were privately constructed and maintained, Adams said. Officials with the Rouse Co., parent company of Owings Mills Mall, said ownership of the road is not clear.

$$ Ca-ching! $$

Looks like a couple women are going to get a nice payment from the Mall.

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When I first read this, I thought, "What a change. From geology to psychology." Then I realized it was just going from rocks in the ground to people with rocks in their heads. :D

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blopblopblopbloplblop....

the first pic shows splashing at the front of the car.....meaning that that stupid ass lady drove into the freaking "puddle". and then she stays in the friggin thing until she has to swim out? i hope her insurance company saw this and didnt pay. dumb ass.

every year when we have flooding, the douchebags on the news go over the same things " dont drive into flooded areas, dont try to walk through, blah blah blah. I always think " well, duh, who dont know that? why do they have to tell us every year?" I guess my questions are answered.

good pics, jag.

"They" always say you should never drive through standing water when you don't know the depth.

Great collection of pics, Jaguar. I saw these a few years ago. I never heard the story behing them. It's obviously the aftermath of a flood in Europe. But that's all you can see in the pics. Do you know more?

No sorry, I think i grabbed them off a dir on a server somewhere a few years ago, they ended up in my gigantic (~3G) random pics folder and I just happened to remember them.

I hope you know that this is the same lady that needs to have stupid instructions on products. For example

Hairdryer : do not use while sleeping
Batman Cape : Does not make user fly
Charcoal : Do not eat
And other stupid ones ( can't remember them all, ate too much charcoal) :rolleyes:

It's a different car then because this one was supposed to have happened last week. Still a great set of shots!

yeah, that and the car is a different color, the street is different, and the blue one looks like it has european tags.

it doesnt look llike the iotd one was hiden by a puddle, either.

Not only that, but look at how close those old people were to the puddle... she was either not paying attention, or trying to be a complete asshole by driving fast through the puddle and soaking all the people standing nearby. ;)

what a jackass !

OK, the woman wasn't smart to drive through the puddle.

In her defense though, a calm, flat, circular shaped puddle on a road appears to be only a few inches deep at the most. She obviously didn't know the pothole was over 10 feet deep. If she did, she wouldn't have driven through it.

Every rainy day, I walk home past a puddle on a busy street. Hundred of people drive through this puddle. They all assume that it's only a couple of inches deep, and they are right. Have none of you ever driven through a puddle before? Most puddles are shallow.

If you are going to mock anyone in the picture, I think the old guy in the front, with the big gut and the bag, is certainly mock-worthy. He just stands there like a doofus during the whole thing.

yeah, you're right, glatt. hindsight is 20/20. looking at the pic where the cop is standing there, i think I would have gone through in my jeep. the close ups don't show that very well.

In my interview for the psychology master's degree, in an attempt to make up for my lack of background in the field, I said to the Dept Chair, "Well, in Geography you look at and plan for aggregate human behavior. What I'm looking at here, is focusing more on individual behavior."

Either that or the fact that I was already employed in one of the more notorious local nuthouses and loving it lead to an interesting exchange. The absent minded prof had scheduled two interviews at the same time ... I was in jeans and a tee shirt, because i was really in "just checking things out mode," hadn't even applied for the program and was picking up the papers to look over that day, expecting to apply for September admission. There was a young lady in business suit, with a briefcase and copy of her Bachelor's in Psychology from a well known university there as well. He talked to us both a bit. At the conclusion of the meeting, he told her that he might consider her for admission to the program if she took a couple additional undergrad psych classes. He turned to me and said, "You will register for my Learning and Memory class. It starts a week from Tuesday."

I had to get my application in REALLY fast.

Hold on, we never mock...

Wrong Glatt, in the film clip, she drove around a roadblock.:rolleyes:

bruce, do you have a link to that clip?

I think what got 202 wasn't an ordinary sinkhole but a limestone fault -- basically a huge mucking crack in the bedrock, like a cave only filled with soil. Put any weight on it, or disturb it too much, and the soil moves out, creating sinkholes.

There certainly are plenty of ordinary sinkholes in the area -- N. Gulph Road had a number of them caused by an underground stream, and the K.O.P mall has had them appear in it's parking lot.

If you remember the movie "Contact" with Jodi Foster, their were several scenes in the first half filmed at the huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico, Observatorio de Arecibo. A quote from their website says:

"Hidden among fields and hills is the world's largest radar-radio telescope, operated by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center of Cornell University. A 20-acre dish, with a 600-ton suspended platform hovering eerily over it, lies in a 563-ft-deep sinkhole in the karst landscape. The observatory has been used to look for extraterrestrial life. Hidden among fields and hills is the world's largest radar-radio telescope, operated by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center of Cornell University. A 20-acre dish, with a 600-ton suspended platform hovering eerily over it, lies in a 563-ft-deep sinkhole in the karst landscape. The observatory has been used to look for extraterrestrial life."

well, I'll try a gif

Hey! Isn't that the radiotelescope that was used in that James Bond movie? The one that was supposedly in Cuba? Goldeneye I think?

Brian

Yup. Was also in "Contact".

Contact.....God that film sucked

No, Jim. I have/had the clip on my computer but as it was quite awhile ago, it may not have been this computer. I'll have to look for it.