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Anyone ever find any giant sinkholes while working?

Finca SDR

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 5, 2017
Messages
246
Location
Costa Rica
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?

132018400_2703997346597193_1700381596733244327_o.jpg
 

thepumpguysc

Senior Member
Joined
Mar 18, 2010
Messages
7,445
Location
Sunny South Carolina
Occupation
Master Inj.Pump rebuilder
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)
 

Finca SDR

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 5, 2017
Messages
246
Location
Costa Rica
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
 

Steve Favia

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2019
Messages
170
Location
illinois
Occupation
Retired local 150 Operating Engineer
Wow! Most of the sink holes I’ve seen have been caused by broken pipe storm sewer sanitary sewer water main field tile etc.
 

Mother Deuce

Senior Member
Joined
Jul 17, 2016
Messages
1,603
Location
New England
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.
 

John C.

Senior Member
Joined
Jun 11, 2007
Messages
12,865
Location
Northwest
Occupation
Machinery & Equipment Appraiser
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.
 

OFF

Senior Member
Joined
Sep 30, 2009
Messages
1,047
Location
Alberta, Canada
Occupation
HD Mechanic
I've got an old well on my property that keeps coming back for more. Not sure what to do with it.
 

Willie B

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
4,039
Location
Mount Tabor VT
Occupation
Electrician
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.
 

sandy

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 16, 2007
Messages
65
Location
Australia
Occupation
diesel mechanic
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.
 

aighead

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 25, 2019
Messages
2,541
Location
Dayton, OH
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.
 
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