Giant Sinkhole Eats Highway in Oregon
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| This gigantic sinkhole opened after a heavy rainstorm along the Oregon coast. |
The startling chasm, which started out less than a foot across in mid-December, suddenly turned into a monster 80 feet in diameter on Jan. 28, after an inch and a half of rain caused a culvert to fail and triggered a landslide nearby. The hole has closed down the stretch of U.S. 101 that runs through the unincorporated town of Harbor, just south of the city of Brookings, according to news reports.
Officials reportedly have estimated that it will take at least a week to repair the hole, which started in the parking lot of the Fireside Diner, and then grew to devour a big hunk of the highway. To further exacerbate the situation, a second, smaller sinkhole opened up in the middle of the road itself.
A spectacular drone video of the damage, shot by local resident Kyle Rice, already has attracted nearly 200,000 views on YouTube. The hole also has attracted coverage from BBC News and Russia’s RT.com, where some readers used it as fodder for anti-American retorts and conspiracy theories. “Research shows US is one big sinkhole,” one wrote, while another suggested that it may have been caused by “hundreds of underground tunnels throughout America.”
The actual explanation is a bit less bizarre. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, sinkholes happen frequently where the rocks below the land surface are porous enough to be dissolved by groundwater circulating through them.
Though USGS identifies Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania as the states where the most sinkhole damage occurs, Oregon also has a history of really big sinkholes. The big kahuna was a 50-foot-deep, 100-foot-long hole that appeared on Interstate 5 near Roseburg in November 1996, causing a pair of big rigs to plunge into it.