Emergency services have freed a fire truck that was caught in a hole for 10 hours and teetering on the edge of a cliff in Bilgola on Sydney's northern beaches.

The fire crew was responding to reports of flooding due to a burst water main about 4:00am when the vehicle hit what they thought was a pothole on The Serpentine Road.

After first using a crane to lift the 14-tonne truck out of the hole, winches and airbags - normally used to lift train carriages - were brought in to help move the truck out of what police called a sink hole.

Fire and Rescue NSW Superintendent Kel McNamara said when the truck became stuck, the crew immediately ensured people in the area were safe.

A sinkhole opened up Tuesday morning at the intersection of Dolan Avenue and 16th Street near Lynn Meadows Discovery Center.

Gulfport Police were blocking the road and rerouting traffic. It's not the first time this section of the road has caved in. Last August, heavy rainfall caused a storm drain under the road to collapse.

A specialist is being called in to evaluate a sinkhole that opened up in between two homes in Plant City on Wednesday morning.

Plant City Fire Rescue crews responded to the sinkhole around 10:55 a.m.

The sinkhole is located in the back yard of a home at 3517 Trapnell Grove Loop. It extends into a neighboring back yard.

The sinkhole measures 4 feet by 10 feet wide and is five feet deep, according to Jim Wilson who is the EMS Chief at Plant City Fire Rescue.

"It is not endangering homes or businesses," said Wilson.

A road in Ranson, West Virginia remains closed after a sinkhole appeared earlier this week.

East Fifth Avenue by Charles Town Races and Slots is still blocked off, and crews were busy assessing the damage Tuesday afternoon.

Officials with the West Virginia Division of Highways say the sinkhole appears to be about 4x4 ft. from the surface, but when they took a look beneath the asphalt, they realized the hole is actually about 11 ft. wide and 20 ft. deep.

Authorities say the sinkhole was created due to erosion from a box culvert under this section of road. Culverts are man-made tunnels that let water pass under the road.

"We're taking a look at it. We have some of our geotechnical folks that are up in that area today beginning to just see how it happened," said Walker.

Walker says they are not sure how long the road will be closed because they are still trying to figure out how to repair it.

Meanwhile, drivers have been detoured away from the area. The closure has added 5 minutes to Vivien Engelberg's commute.

Instead of the usual 10-minute trip from his St. Paul home, Po Lee spent an hour Friday trying to reach the Hmong Village Shopping Plaza, through no fault of his own.

"It's hard to get here," said the 22-year-old vendor at the Moon's Kitchen food stand, whose commute was interrupted by detours around a gaping sinkhole that opened up overnight north of the popular weekend destination.

A sewer line collapsed at Johnson Parkway and Phalen Boulevard about 2 a.m. Friday, creating a crater about 25-feet deep alongside the road and forcing traffic to reroute around the major intersection.

Johnson Parkway is the only north-south through-street between Earl Street and White Bear Avenue and a major gateway to Maryland Avenue, which runs east-west through St. Paul's East Side. Emergency contract crews hired by the Metropolitan Council Environmental Services said the detours will likely be in place for four days or more.

"This is a big one; there's no question about it," said St. Paul City Council member Dan Bostrom, who spent the day touring the neighborhood with Public Works Department workers trying to figure out how best to deal with the traffic backups.

From Staffordshire to Siberia, sinkholes are taking people by surprise. In a scene eerily reminiscent of what recently happened on a Balitmore street, a driver in the town of Tyumen, Siberia, narrowly avoided falling into a giant sinkhole on Thursday when it opened up in the middle of a busy road.

In the video, cars can be seen driving around a large depression in the tarmac when suddenly the road surface gives way, revealing a gaping circular hole.

One black car in particular appears have had a very lucky escape as its rear wheel seems to be right on the edge of the hole as it opens up.

The road was immediately closed. Experts said recent heavy rains probably caused the sinkhole to appear.

A Tallahassee family says they woke up to their dogs barking, and found their grill in a small sinkhole in their front yard.

"It's completely weird for us because even though we've lived in Florida for 14 years, we've never heard about that. Never. So for me it was a crazy thing that happened", says resident Erika Rojas.

Rojas says her family has lived in the home in front of Munson lake for two years. She says they noticed the ground was getting softer the last couple of weeks, but also says they could have never imagined they would have two sinkholes right in their front yard.

Resident Omar Perez has built a construction out of a bed frame that he says will come crashing down if the sinkhole continues to get any larger and come towards their home. He says he got the idea from living in Cuba, where they sometimes will construct things in front of the front door to alert them of intruders. He also says they have to-go back packs ready. They have water and food and they'll go to a hotel tonight, if necessary, and then make sure they can get their kids to school tomorrow.

"I've never seen anything like this before in my life. I just tried to put some noise in the night to wake us up because we won't realize what is there", says Perez.

According to the Public Works Department, because the sinkhole is on private property, the homeowner is responsible for filling the hole. Rojas says the landlord has come by and said he will fill it with concrete, but in the mean time, the family is left building homemade barriers to keep their children and pets out of the holes.

Mrs. Rojas says her family was told today that a sinkhole actually opened in the road right in front of their home shortly before they moved in. She says if their landlord had told them that, they never would have moved there in the first place.

The 3.5m wide sinkhole which closed the Bruce Highway in both directions for almost 14 hours has been filled in.

The Mains Roads Department says the highway has now re-opened and there are no delays.

Earlier, it was reported a sinkhole that opened up south of Bowen has forced the closure of the Bruce Highway.

The sinkhole was intially reported to be 2m wide but authorities this morning said it was now about 3.5m wide and 1.5m deep.

Main Roads engineers are assessing the damage where a large section of the northbound lane collapsed about 20km south of Bowen.

While the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is sparing no effort to fill a rapidly widening sinkhole in Florida since Apr. 23, India's Geological Survey has closed its field station in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands where sinkholes have sprung up all over as an aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami.
The administration in this popular tourist destination in the Bay of Bengal may be prepared for another tsunami. But it seems clueless about these holes in the ground that can sometimes cave in or lead to other geological events like hot springs, water spouts, natural gas emissions or even cracks in the subterranean magma chambers.

Islanders told IPS that sinkholes have appeared all over Nicobar. Whether that is also the case with the Andamans remains a matter of speculation as there is no official documentation of it, nor did the administration facilitate this writer's photo assignment to visit the geologically volatile islands.

IPS discovered and photographed sinkholes in three Nicobar Islands - Car Nicobar, Kamorta and Campbell Bay.

* Up to 500 people feared dead following landslide in northern Afghanistan

* Three bodies pulled out of rubble with 100 more being treated for injuries

* More than 2,000 people are still missing after hill collapsed on Hobo Barik

* Landslide buried some 300 homes in area - about third of all houses there

Up to 500 people are feared dead after a landslide triggered by heavy rains buried a remote village in northeastern Afghanistan today.

Three bodies have been pulled out of the rubble in the Argo district already - with at least 100 more being treated for injuries, according to police.

Badakshan province Gov. Shah Waliullah Adeeb said earlier more than 2,000 people were missing after a hill collapsed on the village of Hobo Barik.