© The Independent, UKArea had been drenched by torrential rainfall in recent days.
No one was injured when it appeared on Wednesday but homes were evacuated amid fears they would slide into the chasm.
The sinkhole was so large that many people mistook it for a landslide.
The Mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, said emergency services cordoned off the area around 26th Street and train services were suspended because the railway was covered in debris.
"We're extremely blessed that we're talking about property damage and damage to the streets and not any loss of life," she added.
The Mayor said she would "take a look" at claims that residents had previously raised concerns about the street.
Comment:
I've run into holes like these while hiking across the Oregon Dunes. One explanation for the holes is that ancient trees that were buried by the sand that decomposed sometimes leave these deep, narrow holes and the holes can persist, under a layer of sand for a very, very long time. I stepped onto such a patch of sand and the sand gave way and I was suddenly in sand up over my knee. When I pulled my foot out and looked down the hole I could not see the bottom. I think I joked to my hiking partner about the holes being created by baby sandworms (the author of Dune, Frank Herbert, said he came up with the original idea for the novel while hiking in the Oregon dunes.) I actually found a reference in another locally-inspired novel that might have even specifically referred to one kind of dune tree hole:
In Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey's fictional novel about a rough logging town on the Oregon coast, a character walking in the dunes at night plummets into the shaft of a buried hollow tree - called a devil's stovepipe.
About "tree holes" in the dunes
About the Oregon Dunes & Frank Herbert connection