Sinkholes
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Homeowners in SE Houston find massive sinkhole in yard

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Sinkhole in southeast Houston
Talk about a sinking feeling! Homeowners in southeast Houston are terrified after finding a huge sinkhole in their back yard.

It's 20 feet deep and 30 feet wide and no one knew the sinkhole was here until a couple of days ago.

Homeowner Dianne Walker noticed it while her brother was doing yard work.

"He said, 'Come here. There's a hole over here,'" said Walker. "I said, 'OK', no, there is a big whole over there."

The hole is already eroding away the fence line, causing a power pole to lean and even more troubling for Walker, the corner of her shed is now hanging over the hole.

"So at any time, it could collapse and that didn't just happen," she said.

Walker says she called Houston Public Works on Thursday about the sinkhole. She says so far, only inspectors have come, but no workers.



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Residents nervous from sudden appearance of sinkholes in Port Richey, Florida neighborhood

WTSP has confirmed that the Neva Lane sinkhole situation involves one confirmed sinkhole and two depressions at the residence
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© wtsp.com
Renee Phillips is packing up and leaving her home on Friday night. Reason? Two possible sinkholes. One in the backyard. One in the front.

Her elderly mother is dragging her suitcase out, too, her vacation visit to see her daughter becoming frightening.

Pasco County Fire Rescue officials say the ground under the house two doors down on Neva Lane in the Gulf Highlands subdivision may be the culprit.

"For the last few couple of days, crews were already working on filling a confirmed sinkhole on the property two doors down when a depression opened up under a foundation wall," said Fire Rescue Personnel Chief Andrew Fossa.

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© wtsp.com

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Huge sinkhole opens up in Williamson County, Illinois

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Sinkhole in Williamson County
A Spillertown couple woke up to a terrifying sight just outside their house when a sinkhole opened up just feet from their door.

The hole seems to have stopped growing but officials say it's 40 feet in diameter and they're unsure how deep it goes.

James Swann says Saturday you couldn't see the water through all the trees lining this pond. By Tuesday, those trees had vanished into a 40-foot wide sink hole.

"There was several trees but they'd just disappear. It was interesting," Swann described the scene. "Just straight down and gone."

Bob Gibson with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources doesn't know much about the sinkhole, except, it sits over an old coal mine.

"Other than it's a pit subsidence, that's really all I know," Gibson said. "It's roughly 40 feet in diameter and we're gonna gauge how deep below ground water it is right now. If you look at it, it's something like 20 feet from the ground surface to water level and then below water level I don't know yet, we're gonna probe that a little bit later."


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Huge sinkhole opens up on golf course in Lenexa, Kansas

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Sinkhole opens on Lenexa golf course
A big sinkhole has opened up on a Lenexa golf course.

The sinkhole is on the left side of the fairway on the 13th hole at Canyon Farms Golf Course. Despite the change in the landscape, the course and the hole itself remain open.

"I believe it's par 4," said golfer Jerry Nelson. "But they have set the tee box way up front about 120 yards out."

Shortening the hole takes the sinkhole out of play.

A statement from the owners said a portion of the course is built over a nonoperating limestone mine. The statement said the majority of the mine is considered stable, according to various geotechnical studies.

Nelson and his partner said they took a good look at the sinkhole as they played the course.


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Sinkholes collapse roads in Susquehanna Valley, Pennsylvania

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Weather may be to blame for two sinkholes that collapsed Susquehanna Valley roads over the weekend and a partial house collapse.
York County

A big sinkhole has shut down part of a road in Carroll Township.

It opened along South Fileys Road at Big Oak Road.

The sinkhole is about 10 yards long and 5 yards wide.

There is no word on when repairs could be made.

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Sinkhole forces residents to evacuate in Illawong, Australia

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The sinkhole in Illawong that opened up about 4pm on Monday.
More than a dozen people have fled their homes at Illawong in Sydney's south after a sinkhole swallowed a backyard on Monday afternoon.

The three-metre deep hole opened up about 4pm, forcing police and firefighters to evacuate a row of townhouses on Osprey Drive.

One man was asleep on his couch when he heard a loud crack in his garden outside, the man's friend, Hisham Bashir said.

"He looked outside and the tree had collapsed and the ground started to sink
," Mr Bashir said.

"Dirt had sprayed up all over his backyard and on the trampoline. There was dirt all over the windows.

"It's pretty scary, but these things happen," he said.

Bizarro Earth

Mysterious underwater vortex filmed in Thai lake

Mystery Swirl
© YouTube Screen Capture
A mystery vortex filmed swirling around in a lake in Thailand has left witnesses baffled.

The whirlpool was spotted in the aqua blue waters of Cheow Lan Lake, a dammed reservoir in Khao Sok National Park in the Surat Thani Province, and lasted for about two minutes.

The swirl left a long, wide trail of white bubbles as it moved through the water in a seemingly random figure-8 path in the video published on YouTube (watch video below) last week.

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Van driven into sinkhole in Cleveland, Ohio

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© WOIOA woman drove into a sinkhole
A messy situation on Cleveland's east side, as Glenside Road was waterlogged and had a deceiving hole on Saturday.

The situation caused some headaches, especially for one driver whose van took a nose dive right into what she thought was a puddle.

"It just was like, boom, and then smoke started rolling up off of the driver's side," Dikisha Taylor said.

There was unexpected damage to her vehicle.

"The bumper, the light, the door, you can see it's still dripping water," she said.

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2 cars in landslide plunge on the Otago Peninsula, New Zealand

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© nzvegaA section of Highcliff Rd had slipped away as the motorists made their way through the area
Barry McCone has evaded tree branches and wandering stock on the winding route home from work before, but nothing prepared him for his latest encounter.

A claw hammer was used to smash a rear window and free the Milton prison officer from his Ford Falcon, which was one of two vehicles that rolled off Highcliff Rd and into a deep hole caused by a landslide on the Otago Peninsula on Wednesday night.

"I was coming home from work, it was raining still quite heavily and it was foggy. I know that road pretty well, I came around the corner and the next thing I was tipping over, I didn't know what the hell was going on."

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Cement truck partly swallowed by sinkhole in Saskatoon

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© Derek Zary A morning delivery in Saskatoon didn’t go according to plan after a cement truck fell into a sinkhole.
It was a sinking feeling for a morning delivery man in Saskatoon. A cement truck went through a sinkhole in a back alley on Mackie Crescent.

Derek Zary captured the moments afterwards on video.

Zary told Global News the fully loaded cement truck arrived around 8 a.m. Wednesday to make a delivery when it went through the sinkhole.

A crane had to be called in to lift the truck out of the hole - an operation that took three hours. Crews also had to deal with underground power lines, but power to the area did not have to be shut off.