Giant Guatemalan 'Sinkhole' Is Worse Than We Thought

reillymj writes "Despite hundreds of media reports to the contrary, Sam Bonis, a geologist whose life work has been studying Guatemalan geology, has plainly said that the dramatic 'sinkhole' in Guatemala City that opened over the weekend isn't a sinkhole at all. Instead, he called it a 'piping feature' and warned that because the country's capital city sits on a pile of loose volcanic ash, the over one million people living on top of the pile are in danger. 'I'd hate to have to be in the government right now,' Bonis, who worked for the Guatemalan government's Instituto Geografico Nacional for 16 years, said. 'There is an excellent potential for this to happen again. It could happen almost anywhere in the city.'"

Comments

Look on the bright side

[IndustrialComplex]

Looks like the city nearly doubled its surface area!

Re:Look on the bright side

[Barrinmw]

This was the perfect opportunity for him to make a pun. "There is an excellent potential for this to happen again. It could happen almost anywhere in the city.' Should have been "I have a sinking feeling that this could happen again."

Re:Look on the bright side

[NotQuiteReal]

That sucks.

Re:Look on the bright side

[Maxo-Texas]

The city could have a hole lot of problems.

Re:Look on the bright side

[aquila.solo]

Yeah, what a money pit.

Re:Look on the bright side

[matrim99]

After seeing that amazing picture and realizing that it wasn't a really bad Photoshop job, I almost expected the headline to read "Higgs Boson Found!".

Re:Look on the bright side

[hosecoat]

[It] isn't a sinkhole at all. Instead, he called it a 'piping feature'

it's not a hole it's a feature

Re:Look on the bright side

[dgatwood]

From orbit? It's the only way to be sure.

Re:Look on the bright side

[MarkGriz]

Nah... it's probably all downhill from here.

Re:Look on the bright side

[Anonymous Coward]

So now the went from "GuateMala" to "GuatePeor"..

Re:Look on the bright side

[AliasMarlowe]

The city could have a hole lot of problems.

...unless they take a holistic approach to them!

Re:Look on the bright side

[theguyfromsaturn]

Won't ever complain about the pot holes in my street again.

Moving the country?

[MalHavoc]

Probably not even remotely possible due to its size, but a similar problem seems to have been created in Kiruna, in Sweden. The town sits on top of the world's largest iron ore mine, and the mine has created a large cavity under the town. They are moving everything, in some cases, literally brick by brick. There's a neat article about it in this month's National Geographic.

Re:Moving the country?

[swanzilla]

Probably not even remotely possible due to its size, but a similar problem seems to have been created in Kiruna, in Sweden. The town sits on top of the world's largest iron ore mine, and the mine has created a large cavity under the town. They are moving everything, in some cases, literally brick by brick. There's a neat article about it in this month's National Geographic.

Guatemala != Guatemala City

Thirteen and two million resindents, respectively...either way, your idea is awful.

Re:Moving the country?

[nightfire-unique]

Probably not even remotely possible due to its size, but a similar problem seems to have been created in Kiruna, in Sweden. The town sits on top of the world's largest iron ore mine, and the mine has created a large cavity under the town. They are moving everything, in some cases, literally brick by brick. There's a neat article about it in this month's National Geographic.

I dunno why, but I suddenly pictured a bunch of embarrassed Swedes whistling as they quietly move the town over a few hundred meters.

Re:Moving the country?

[couchslug]

"Thirteen and two million resindents, respectively...either way, your idea is awful. "

It isn't "awful" if it's necessary, then it's just "unfortunate".

The intelligent thing to do is (gradually) either relocate (much work to replicate systems) or DISPERSE the city elsewhere. Efficient dispersal of population is likely the lowest-impact way to deal with the disaster.

Re:Moving the country?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect, in practice, there will be a certain amount of moving going on(of the "run screaming" variety, if not a formal program.)

The tricky thing is, though, that moving large numbers of people is actually pretty difficult, and has a history of not working out very well, especially in areas where resources are slim, or governance isn't brilliant.. Moving slightly under 20K people, as part of a formal program, in a country with a GDP per capita of ~$36,000, is a pain in the ass, and won't be cheap; but is doable.

Moving 2 million(or even a substantial fraction thereof), in a country with a GDP per capita of ~$2,700 could get ugly. Like "squalid children with big eyes huddled under sodden tarps in disease-infested refugee camps" ugly.

While the occasional sinkhole is scary and dramatic, the human costs of staying put and paying closer attention to hydrology, and possibly dealing with the occasional sinkhole incident, are almost certainly lower than trying to move on that scale.

Re:Moving the country?

[Cheeko]

Having just gotten back from Guatemala, you already see a fair amount of the "squalid children with big eyes huddled under sodden tarps" even if not in the urban centers.

The country has some pretty significant poverty/living condition issues and the city is one of the BETTER parts of the country. Any sort of relocation project is entirely impossible given the finances and state of the nation.

The issue really is that any sort of infrastructure project might be equally crippled. This in many ways reminds of the situation in Haiti prior to the earthquake. They know they are in a hazardus environment, but the lack of ability to implement anything in terms of building code or infrastructure programs means that prayer and luck are the only options.

Re:Moving the country?

[IndustrialComplex]

Probably not even remotely possible due to its size, but a similar problem seems to have been created in Kiruna, in Sweden. The town sits on top of the world's largest iron ore mine, and the mine has created a large cavity under the town. They are moving everything, in some cases, literally brick by brick.

That sounds like an aweful lot of bork.

Re:Moving the country?

[Bakkster]

He said the intelligent thing to do, not realistic.

It would be the 'best' thing, but as it concerns humans, which are emotional and irrational beings, it's highly unlikely.

Re:Moving the country?

[tlhIngan]

I dunno why, but I suddenly pictured a bunch of embarrassed Swedes whistling as they quietly move the town over a few hundred meters.

And a bunch of confused tourists wondering why their GPSes are off so badly - the map is right, but it says the town is somewhere else.

Re:Moving the country?

[timeOday]

While the occasional sinkhole is scary and dramatic, the human costs of staying put and paying closer attention to hydrology, and possibly dealing with the occasional sinkhole incident, are almost certainly lower than trying to move on that scale.

I agree relocating en masse is unlikely. There has to be some way to map this. If we can find oil deposits under a mile of water and another mile of rock, there must be a way to do this. Maybe ground penetrating radar. Perhaps total collapse is preceded by depressions that can be tracked over time with synthetic aperture radar. There must be a way.

Re:Moving the country?

[onkelonkel]

"Better to disperse them back to subsistence farming; at least that's SOME living, rather than NO living."

This may not be true. I remember learning about England during the Industrial Revolution. Hordes of people flocking into the cities to work endless hours for low wages in dirty, dangerous mills. Somebody asked "If it was so horrible for the factory workers why did they all go there" The teacher made the point that as bad as the factories were, it was still better than farming. Farmers worked as many hours or more than the factory workers, and the conditions were often just as dangerous. On top of that weather, disease and pests could wipe out your crops and leave you with nothing and you would starve. In the mills, as long as you worked you could feed your family; on the farms you could work hard and still starve.

Re:Moving the country?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Depends on where on the priorities list it falls, I suspect. In pretty much all societies, things happen according to how much people care, not by catering to the most miserable first, and working up from there.

Now, all that makes no difference if there isn't some relatively cheap way; but I have to imagine that detecting the difference between solid rock and unstable loose fill in the top hundred meters or so is probably about the easiest Reflection Seismology problem that you'll run into in the real world. Might have to bum some supercomputer time; but you'll be way behind the difficultly curve compared to the reflection seismology problems that the oil guys are doing all the time.

The second question, of course, is whether these unstable patches are fixable in some cheap way. Knowing which half of the capital you have to evacuate is only incrementally more helpful than knowing that you have to evacuate half the capital. If, on the other hand, it turns out that you can just drill a well(ie. basic water-well drilling tech, cheap and widely available) and then pump in some cement, that might actually be economically practical, compared to the alternatives.

Re:Moving the country?

[Dogtanian]

I remember learning about England during the Industrial Revolution. [..] Somebody asked "If it was so horrible for the factory workers why did they all go there" The teacher made the point that as bad as the factories were, it was still better than farming.

It's not quite as simple as that. In the case of England during the Industrial Revolution, the inclosures act(s) effectively made it more difficult for people to earn a living on the land as they had done previously, and increasingly forced them to move into cities to undertake industrial work. The Marxist interpretation is that the government was effectively legislating people off the land and into the capitalist system.

I'm not saying that working on the land was an easy option by any means- only that saying that people left it entirely of their own free will is misleading.

Some may argue the same thing happens nowadays when people leave farming to take up city-based factory work in third world countries- there is an active external force/agenda (e.g. those international bodies wishing to force through capitalist/free-market reforms by tying aid or loans to them) coercing people into the industrial option by making the old way of doing things unworkable.

Re:Moving the country?

[MoellerPlesset2]

I dunno why, but I suddenly pictured a bunch of embarrassed Swedes whistling as they quietly move the town over a few hundred meters.

Well, it's not the first town we've moved! Malmberget and Grängesberg are a few others. And Falun (one of the world's largest copper mines from the 7th century until it closed in 1992) collapsed in 1687 resulting in a hole 1.5 km in diameter right next to the town. (Miraculously, nobody was injured because it occured during one of their few holidays).

Here's a pic I took in Grängesberg (the largest ore body in Sweden second only to Kiruna), whose old town center had to be evacuated in the 1970's. The farther wall of the building has fallen into the open pit (and in the background, one can glimpse the mine office and one of the main shaft elevators). The pit behind it is well over 100 meters deep. That mine was shut down in 1991, and even though it filled at rates of tens of thousands of cubic meters of water per month, it took 18 years to fill up after the pumps were switched off.

/Unabashed mine geek.

Re:Moving the country?

[element-o.p.]

I was in Guatemala (and Guatemala City) in January, so let me provide a little perspective on this. Guatemala is a country of contrasts -- downtown Guatemala City is very modern, and very nice, for the most part. It's industrialized, and most (U.S.) Americans wouldn't feel *that* out-of-place, other than the barbed-wire everywhere (don't be out alone after dark...) and the Spanish on all the signs. However, most of us in the U.S. or Europe have no concept of the degree of poverty that lives right next to the upper and middle class. There is an entire community of people living in the *dump* in Guatemala City; generations have spent their entire lives living in the city dump. There's a lower-middle class neighborhood right next to the airport that would be a slum in the U.S.; it certainly wasn't the nicest part of Guatemala City, but it wasn't exceptional. And the city isn't small, either. It might not be L.A., New York or Chicago, but you're talking about a non-trivial number of people.In other words, while moving the city might be the logical thing to do, you've got to understand that Guatemala is not a particularly prosperous country. Furthermore, Guatemala is pretty much filled with volcanoes. Sure, building a city of two million people on a porous ash field might not be particularly smart, but there isn't much else to build on there, except for the volcanoes themselves. As you can see, cinder-cone volcanoes (which I believe these are; geologists, please correct me if I'm wrong) have pretty steep sides; you aren't going to move the city there.

Having said that, there is precedent for moving the city. It wasn't Guatemala City, but the city of Antigua in Guatemala had to be moved...but it was a lot smaller than Guatemala City is today.

Errr... yeah

[DavidR1991]

The article's title (Don't call it a sinkhole) is certainly on the money. I was shocked. If you haven't read/looked at the article, do. I was expecting, you know, a little crater thing or something. This is far, far beyond that. It is literally a massive cylindrical hole. It's amazing.

Re:Errr... yeah

[Random2]

The worst part is it's depth, so the land looks safe to build on; while in reality it is far more dangerous.

Re:Errr... yeah

[linguizic]

Yeah the picture of the piping feature is quite impressive, however the article actually sucks at explaining why these features happen in the first place. It's the equivalent of writing a story about the the Winter Park Sinkhole and merely stating that it's what happens when you build a town on top of limestone. Ironically, the article explains how sinkholes happen better than it does piping features.

Re:Errr... yeah

[Tapewolf]

I've seen the picture before, but only by clicking on the one in the article to get a higher-res version do I finally think I understand what it is I'm seeing.

See, there was this darker bit at the bottom that you couldn't make out properly, I figured it was an artifact of the image, or a heap of black stuff at the bottom. When it first went around the office, people were saying 'Why can't you see the bits of the building at the bottom?'
Now that I can see it more clearly, it seems to me that the brown bit is the crust, and the black bit is a hole into a fuck-off big cavern, which could quite easily be as big as the rest of the picture, if not much of the town.

Re:Errr... yeah

[perryizgr8]

and its so nearly perfect that your mind screams "PHOTOSHOP!!!!!!!".

Re:Errr... yeah

[Stormy Dragon]

So this city has a literal real estate bubble?

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[Pojut]

I think you are confusing it with this.

Division by Zero

[Drakkenmensch]

Don't do it.

Flikr

[Anonymous Coward]

The full size version of that photo thats always on the front page of this story is on flikr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gobiernodeguatemala/4657053554/sizes/l/

Amazing, it looks like something out of a scifi movie. Did the death star missfire?

Re:Flikr

[Anonymous Coward]

All stupid jokes aside, can anyone explain why the side walls of the sink hole are so perfectly vertical?

How could something caused by water escaping from a broken pipe result in a perfectly circular, perfectly vertical hole?

Something else is going on, but rather than talking about that, all the /.'ers ever do is spew stupid puns.

Re:Why the wait?

[Nadaka]

RTFA?

In 2007, a similar hole opened after a sewage pipe broke pipe just a few blocks from this weekend's disaster. Bonis was part of a team of geologists and engineers brought in to investigate and advise officials on what went wrong.

"Our recommendation was that this could happen again," he recalled. "When you have water flowing from storm water runoff, a sewage pipe, or any kind of strong flow, it eats away at the loose material. We don't know how long it has to go on before it collapses. But once it starts collapsing, God help us."

I have a solution

[elrous0]

Just put giant parachutes on all the buildings.

Centralia

[adeft]

Here in PA we have a town called Centralia that is over an active burning coal fire. I believe it has been burning for over 50 years. The town was considered unfit to live in and everyone was encouraged to move. There are still some stragglers remaining, I believe the population is about 5 people. You can still walk/drive through it, but at your own risk as sink holes are a huge issue. If you can ignore the rediculous pop-ups pictures of what a zombie apocalypse might look like here

Re:Centralia

[thms]

While we are talking about unusual man-made geological features, Hell's Gate should not be omitted.

It is essentially a big crater in Uzbekistan where natural gas has been burning for decades. Back when it formed they ignited the gas. From a current perspective that still makes sense, as burning it in this case converts methane which has a several times larger warming potential than CO2. Underground coal of course is just the opposite and given they have been burning so long I assume it is beyond current tech to extinguish them other than the very costly way of dumping tons of concrete into the ground.

Re:Why the wait?

[maxume]

Perhaps it is just news to you?

Call in the Fantastic Four

[RivenAleem]

It's the Rise of the Silver Surfer!!!

It's not a sinkhole

[GungaDan]

Goatse recently moved to Guatemala City.

Re:It's not a sinkhole

[rvw]

Goatse recently moved to Guatemala City.

Guatamala Opened Arse To Sink Everyone?

Re:It's not a sinkhole

[DragonWriter]

If you don't know what Goatse is you don't want to know

The first part of that sentence is superfluous, since if you do know what goatse is, you still don't want to know.

Hey wait, idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Any chance a large amount of oil would fix things?

Re:Hey wait, idea!

[sorak]

Any chance a large amount of oil would fix things?

No, but I'm unfamiliar with Guatemalan politics. Which party do we blame for this?

I think this guy used to be a software dev manager

[bobdotorg]

That huge gaping hole that swallowed your neighbor? That's not a geological bug, it's a 'feature'.

The entrance...

[Midnight Thunder]

I think we have just found the entrance to middle earth. Does anyone see any dinosaurs or dragons down there?

Well this is unusual

[imgod2u]

My ex made a /. headline!

Some good pictures

[InsprdInsnty]

Here's some interesting photos of the area http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/a_rough_week_for_guatemala.html

Re:Some good pictures

[ColdWetDog]

You know, Guatemala covers the geographic location of the ancient Mayan civilization.

It's getting pretty close to 2012.

Just sayin ...

I have an environment friendly solution!

[Phizzle]

Lets fill this thing with our corrupt career politicians and lawyers, I know the hole isn't big enough - but its a start!

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[thijsh]

I think you are confusing it with this... look at the photo, if any feature on the earth ever looked like a gate to hell it's this fiery pit. :-)

Re:sinkhole

[Itninja]

Actually 'sinked' is more proper/correct, though I no it sounds weird. Kind of like the last line in To Kill a Mockingbird: "[Atticus] would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning"

This is Guatemala City!

[dorkinson]

A group of Iranian visitors inspecting the hole claimed that it was "madness", but they were quickly dealt with.

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[datapharmer]

That just looks like a lame knockoff of Yellowstone.

Re:Stupid Question

[arkane1234]

The sun isn't man-made and it's circular...
circular != man-made
man-made usually equals circular, however.
I do agree though, when I saw the picture the first time I instantly thought, "PHOTOSHOPPED!" because it looked so out of place and video-game'ish.

Re:sinkhole

[MBGMorden]

Actually 'sinked' is more proper/correct, though I no it sounds weird.

You "no" it sounds weird?

Somehow I don't think I'll be taking advice on what's more proper/correct from you.

For what it's worth, a quick glance at Dictionary.com shows no results at all for sinked (and Firefox's spell checker just red-lined it when I typed it), while it clearly identifies sunk as the proper past tense of sink.

Volcanic ash piping disaster missing from SimCity

[noidentity]

Learning about this "piping feature" that could happen almost anywhere in the city, I suddenly feel that my past SimCity experiences have been missing something. Having a hole open up randomly in a SimCity, swallowing buildings and power poles. Awesome! Be sure to give it a keyboard shortcut, because I want to use it a lot.

I live here and...

[Anonymous Coward]

the "sinkhole" happened because of the irresponsible leaders we have in the government. If you look at the picture of the sinkhole from above you'll see a that there's a sort of tunnel at the bottom, which forms part of the sewer system. underneath that factory that sinked there was a vertical cylindrical (not as big as the hole) acces tunnel to check on the massive sewer, which they didn't reinforce or took care of properly, the water started filtraring arround it and washing the way outwards to form the gigantic cylindrical hole, it's not likely to happen like that all over Guatemala, and your average sinkhole has the same probability as in any other city in the same circumstances, which is still high but heck, were are you safe these days...

When I started here all there was was ash!

[RevWaldo]

All the other mayors said I was daft to build a city on top of ash, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em!

.

Picture of the bottom

[Frederic54]

There is a couple of pictures of the "sinkhole" there, and especially one of the bottom, it seems there is a big cave

http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/Guatemala-sinkhole/(photo)/2

Re:Picture of the bottom

[Scrameustache]

There is a couple of pictures of the "sinkhole" there, and especially one of the bottom, it seems there is a big cave

http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/Guatemala-sinkhole/(photo)/2

THANK YOU, thank you, thank you!

I've been looking for a better view, and wondering where that big slice of earth went.

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[glavenoid]

I'm surprised that the fire pit was not renamed "Turkmenbashi" since the old leader, Saparmurat Niyazov named himself, and just about everything else in Turkmenistan "Turkmenbashi".

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[gstoddart]

Turkmenistan? Wikipedia is making up country names now?

So must the CIA, the BBC, and even their own embassy and government. They've got their own TLD for crying out loud.

Seriously, listen to the news or something. Read a book. It's an actual country.

From Guatemalan point of view

[denn1s]

I'm from Guatemala. This is actually the second (and smaller) sinkhole. The first one was located not too far away, http://conred.gob.gt/galeria/fotos/fotografias-de-incidentes-1969-2009/640x480Hundimiento%20Barrio%20San%20Antonio%20Zona%206%20102%202007.JPG/image_preview and happened last year. However, earth just doesn't open, first huge rumbling sounds begin, then, after a couple of weeks, earth opens. Also, we have already pinpointed possible new sinkhole locations, one which is barely 200mts from the last one. Now is just a matter of time to see if the government does something, which is unlikely.

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[Forge]

Turkmenistan? Wikipedia is making up country names now?

Wikipedia may have made up Uzbekistan, but not Turkmenistan. That was made up by Burat or somebody.

Emergence Day

[Aqualung812]

That's not a sinkhole, that's a Emergence Hole. Someone better toss a grenade in there ASAP before the Locusts Horde starts streaming out!

Re:sinkhole

[AthanasiusKircher]

First of all...whoosh.

I don't get the joke here either. Are you claiming "sinked" is correct or not? Did you intend to say "no" instead of "know" or not? I think you need [sarcasm] tags.

Secondly, I would recommend a real (e.g. physical), unabridged dictionary. However if you want you want to use an online dictionary I would recommend thefreedictionary.com as it is far more expansive on pronunciation.

Actually, the best unabridged dictionary in the world is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is available online (for a subscription fee, though). It's better than the paper form of the OED, which isn't updated as frequently.

The -ed in past tense verbs becomes more common in ares that have been speaking English for a longer period of time. For example, in the Southern US (where they have been speaking English for a long time), and in England (where English was invented) many verbs are in the -ed format: swimmed, runned, stinged, waked, sinked, etc.

I'm going to have to call BS on this part. The OED is the standard authority of English in England. Under "sink" it lists:

Pa. tense sank, sunk. pa. pple. sunk, sunken.

The OED is notorious for being a bit permissive in such matters, being a fairly descriptive dictionary. If "sinked" were a common form, it would be listed as such. Furthermore, even in the historical list of forms, "sinked" comes up short:

pa. tense. {alpha}. sing. 1, 3-4 sanc, 5 sanck; 4-5 sanke, 4-5, 8- sank. pl. 5-7 sanke, 6 sancke, 9- sank. {beta}. sing. 1 sonc, 4 sonk. pl. 3-5 sonken, 5-6 sonke, 6 soncke, 6-7 soonke. {gamma}. pl. 1 suncon, 3 sunken, sunke, 5 sunkyn; also sing. 6 suncke, 6-7 sunke, sunck, 7- sunk. {delta}. 5 synked, 7 (9 dial.) sinked. pa. pple. {alpha}. 1 suncen, 3 i-sunken (Orm. sunnkenn), 3- sunken, 4 sunkin, -yn, 6 suncken; 4-7 sunke, 6-7 sunck(e, 7- sunk. {beta}. 4-5 sonken, 5 sonkyn; Sc. 5 sonkine, -yne, 6 sonkin; 4 i-sonke, 6 son(c)ke, soonke, 7 soonk. {gamma}. 9 sank, dial. sinken.

Here "sinked" is only listed as a relatively minor historical dialect form, hardly what is "proper/correct" as you claim. Moreover, it doesn't appear to be that historically important, and certainly not the most common "old" form.

Re:Empathy?

[Anomalyst]

like anyone cares about someones dramatic loss of empathy.

Re:sinkhole

[Gulthek]

Hey now, you can't "whoosh" and argue at the same time. You either agree to pretend that your original post was a joke (whoosh) or you can continue to futilely argue.

Luckily I happen to work at an institution with a subscription to the OED. Let's look shall we?

c1250 Gen. & Ex. 3775 Alle he sunken e ere wi-in, Wi wifes, and childre, and hines-kin.

Yeah, that 1250 is the year the quote was written. This usage is also specifically referring to sunk into the earth.

All told, their examples for the word "sink" have 55 uses of the work sunk and 0 of the word sinked. Sinked is listed as an obscure, colloquial use though.

The argument for centuries has been between sank and sunk, sinked is right out.

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blogger-blog/2010/01/honey-i-sunk-boat.html

We're Talkin' Biblical Proportions

[NicknamesAreStupid]

This is amazing, and the implications are epic and nightmarish for anyone sleeping in that city. That said, then what the hell is at the bottom of that hole? The pictures do not tell the story. I gotta know. Anybody with a few hundred feet of rope and a wench want to drop me into it?

Re:sinkhole

[AthanasiusKircher]

Oh, by the way, I realized some might not be familiar with the number convention of archaic spellings in the OED. Basically, a number "1" means before the year 1100, other numbers mean the succeeding centuries -- 2 = 12th century (1100-1200), 3 = 13th century, etc.

So, "sinked" in this case is listed as "7 (9 dial.)", which means that it was common in the 17th century (1600-1700) era, and apparently was a dialect form in some regions in the 19th century. Not exactly a popular historical form.

what is 200mts?

[nuggz]

Did you mean 200m?

Re:sinkhole

[mdda]

> "In England" : swimmed, runned, stinged, waked, sinked, etc.

Not the England where I'm from...

Re:Where did the material go?

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like it wasn't "soil" as we would normally think of, like topsoil....more like an airy layer of volcanic ash, fluffed up like a merengue or souffle, more air than solid matter. As a geology major, if I were looking it up, I'd search on 'volcanic tuff' or 'tufa'. I know nothing beyond what was in the summary, but unless these types of deposits undergo a lot of geological changes and become pretty solid because of heat/pressure, it's like a house of cards collapsing - the particles were stacked with mostly air between, and then the water washed them loose.

For remediation, if they're serious about saving lives, they could study the ground for void spaces using ground-penetrating radar (I'm imagining the small units not much bigger than a large lawnmower) pretty quickly, to find the shallower voids that have formed, and get people away from those spots/areas. Larger voids could be searched out by other methods. They should get staff working on control of drainage, and minimize water draining into the ground, ensuring that it drains away from the city. They could put out a grid of GPS sensors and monitor ground subsidence. Of course, who knows how much money and resources will actually be put towards such efforts.

Re:sinkhole

[gknoy]

Also (I wish I'd thought of this before posting), the common-ness of a spelling is orthogonal to its proper-ness. Hundreds of thousands of teens spell "wait" as "w8" and "your" as "ur" (while also abusing the same letters to mean "you are" and "you're"), but I doubt anyone would consider that a proper spelling of the word.

Now, if you want to say that some particular mangling of a word (like "runned" or "sinked") is used in some dialect, that's OK. The rest of the English-speaking world, though, tends to believe that they don't know how (or want) to speak proper English.

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[laejoh]

Naa, just a lame knockoff of goatse!

#DIV/0! error

[PowerEdge]

When I see that picture, I am imagining a Guatemalan who just divided by zero and jumps into the hole exclaiming in their best Buzz Light-year voice: "To infinity and beyooooond!!!"

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[Maxo-Texas]

That is both very funny, well related, and yet more disgusting that I really want to process.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[roman_mir]

He was getting too much spam on the Balrog account, it's a feature, not a bug.

Re:I love the difference from the US...

[John Hasler]

> In all the photos, probably taken at least 12 hours later, if not days, not
> even an orange cone.

Look at the first picture. The street is barricaded a block away.