Tragedy in Florida puts spotlight on sinkholes, northwest Ohio has also seen its share

A giant sinkhole is shown at the site of Jeff Bush’s home in Seffner, Fla. The sinkhole opened up under a bedroom in the home on Feb. 28 and swallowed Mr. Bush, 37. Officials eventually gave up hope of finding him alive and filled in the hole with crushed rock. The house was razed.

TAMPA BAY TIMES

A giant sinkhole is shown at the site of Jeff Bush’s home in Seffner, Fla. The sinkhole opened up under a bedroom in the home on Feb. 28 and swallowed Mr. Bush, 37. Officials eventually gave up hope of finding him alive and filled in the hole with crushed rock. The house was razed.

The ground suddenly opening beneath our feet is the stuff of nightmares.

Hank Martinez, top, Ed Magaletta, right, and Russ Nobbe examine a sinkhole that golfer Mark Minhal fell into in Waterloo, Ill. Mr. Minhal, 43, suffered a dislocated shoulder.

In recent weeks, a spate of those bad-dreams-come-true have drawn national attention when the earth seemingly swallowed a man in his Florida bedroom and a golfer in Illinois.

After the widespread coverage of those sinkholes and others, some experts say the phenomena may be scarier in thought than in reality.

About 20 percent of the country has underground geology that favors the formation of natural sinkholes, the U.S. Geological Survey says. But in developed areas, any pipeline or sewer can collapse in the right circumstances.

“I'd guess there is this primal fear of being swallowed up by the earth and taken to hell,” said Paul Greene, an associate professor of psychology at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., who works with disaster victims. “I recall scenes from the movie Ghost when the evil characters die and their souls are taken down in the ground by demons.”

Sinkholes may not rank as high on the scare scale as hurricanes and tornados, but they hold some allure for popular culture, surfacing as cinematic themes and on apocalyptic Web sites as a sign of approaching end times.

At the U.S. Geological Survey, geologist Randall Orndorff says sinkholes are more common than laymen realize. “They form in fields and woods every day and no one notices except the land owner. Obviously, where property is damaged or a life lost, there’s greater awareness. They can be a hazard and we want people to know about them.”

In some areas, such as Florida, the holes are widely studied and mapped; elsewhere, only those that cause structural damage to a building or road get noted.

“There’s no master database of them, but there’s no reason to think any more of them are forming,” Mr. Orndorff said.

The USGS hopes to issue later this year the first national interactive map that people can click to see if their property may be in sinkhole country, with links to state resources for more detail, Mr. Orndorff said.

The basic ingredients of sinkholes are water — or sometimes the lack of it — and soil or rock that’s easily eroded underground. Acidic rainwater slowly melts away soft rock such as limestone or salt or dolomite. The removal of groundwater creates voids. Either way, the overlying soil sinks.

Several recent sinkhole deaths have been tied to human activity. Two water-well drillers in Florida died in 2011 when their rigs broke through the roof of a cavern. Also that year, a Bakersfield, Calif., oil worker died in a sinkhole near a well where state officials noted steam had been used for several years to drive crude to the surface.

In Idaho last July, a woman died when she drove her car into a collapsed roadway. Officials later determined that gophers digging nearby had created channels that caused rainwater to undermine the highway.

But it was last month’s death of Jeff Bush in his bedroom in a suburban Tampa home that has put sinkholes in the spotlight of media and social media.

In May, 2008, a massive sinkhole near Daisetta, Texas, swallowed up oil field equipment and some vehicles.

“When something like this happens, it seems like it’s out of the blue and makes people wonder if they’re susceptible,” said Russell Jones, a psychology professor at Virginia Tech who studies disaster stress. “People need to be aware of the probability of this actually happening to them before they respond in a frightful or arbitrary way.”

Recent media reports and Twitter threads in the past two weeks discussed other sinkholes in Florida; Pennsylvania (including one that drained a duck pond); and Louisiana. A memorable collapse on a Waterloo, Ill., golf course swallowed a quarter of a foursome: a 43-year-old mortgage banker who dislocated a shoulder and had to be pulled out by his friends with a makeshift rope. The Louisiana sinkhole, the 9-acre result of a collapsed salt dome near Bayou Corne that began last year, has displaced about 350 people and drawn a visit from environmental activist Erin Brockovich.

Curiously, a 2000 made-for-television movie titled On Hostile Ground was also set in Louisiana, with the premise that New Orleans was about to be swallowed by a giant sinkhole on the eve of Mardi Gras.

And a 2003 short film titled Sinkhole was shot in part around the mostly abandoned town of Centralia, Pa., which has been smoldering and collapsing from an underground coal fire for more than 50 years.

Yet aside from a few appearances in Star Wars films and earthquake flicks and generations of quicksand scenes, the cinematic potential that may lurk beneath our feet remains mostly untapped.

Northwest Ohio has seen its share of sinkholes in recent years. For example:

● In January, 2012, a sinkhole formed in the 2000 block of Toledo’s Scottwood Avenue when a 24-inch brick sewer collapsed.

● In March, 2011, a 33-foot-deep sinkhole caused the closing of River Road at Key Street in Maumee. The cause? A storm sewer collapse.

● In early 2008, a cavernous sinkhole opened up at State Rt. 64 and King Road near Haskins in Wood County.

In fall of 2011, the Ohio Department of Transportation took precautions against sinkholes along State Rt. 2 in eastern Ottawa County, where gypsum rock was once mined. Coaxial cable was strung under part of the roadway to serve as sensors for possible shifting beneath the pavement

Meanwhile, those with a fascination about sinkholes have some options for pursuing their interest.

It can happen in this area too. In 2008, a large sinkhole at the intersection of State Rt. 64 and King Road closed Route 64 through nearby Haskins in Wood County.

There is thesinkhole.org, a Web site that bills itself as “the world’s largest collection of sinkholes” and posts breezy accounts, replete with photographs, of holes in the ground. There is also the 13th Multidisciplinary Conference on Sinkholes and the Engineering and Environmental Impacts of Karst, known by insiders as the Sinkhole Conference, which is coming up in May. As many as 150 experts will be there.

The conference includes a tour of a radioactive waste pilot plant inside a New Mexico salt mine. It also includes extensive tours of real and mostly untouched natural New Mexico sinkholes.

Some observers, however, see increasing reports of sinkholes as harbingers of greater disasters. They chronicle the events as pointing to the Apocalyse on sites such as endtimesrevelations.wordpress.com

Blade staff contributed to this report.