They're moving! Cars parked in Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood are seen tilted and shifting
* 19 homes have been evacuated and residents may have to stay out of their homes for up to 40 days
* Residents said they complained in the past but were told area is safe
A new video has emerged, showing the collapse of a Baltimore street on Wednesday.
Taken in the city's Charles Village neighborhood, onlookers are heard screaming 'It's moving' and 'Oh my God' as multiple parked cars - as well as CSX railroad tracks behind them - fall on East 26th Street. A light pole and nearby trees are also captured plummeting.
A deafening noise is heard in the video as water surges in the wake of the crash. No injuries were reported.
Residents may have to be kept out of their homes for up to 40 days, officials said.
19 homes have been evacuated, WJZ reports, and says gas, water and waste services have been shut down.
Though Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake spokesman Kevin Harris said on Thursday he did not know how many houses or people were affected, he said city officials will meet with residents on Friday morning.
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