Don't call the Guatemala sinkhole a sinkhole because it's not! It's a "piping feature," said by geologist, Sam Bonis.
The the 100-foot deep, 66-foot wide circular chasm that happened in Guatemala was formed after the country was hit by the Tropical storm Agatha. Also, the city's bad drainage has contributed to its formation.
According to Bonis, “Our recommendation was that this could happen again. When you have water flowing from storm water runoff, a sewage pipe, or any kind of strong flow, it eats away at the loose material. We don’t know how long it has to go on before it collapses. But once it starts collapsing, God help us.”
According to Wikipedia:
A sinkhole, also known as a sink, shake hole, swallow hole, swallet, doline or cenote, is a natural depression or hole in the surface topography caused by karst processes - the chemical dissolution of carbonate rocks. Sinkholes may vary in size from less than 1 to 300 meters (3.3 to 980 ft) both in diameter and depth, and vary in form from soil-lined bowls to bedrock-edged chasms. They may be formed gradually or suddenly, and are found worldwide. These terms are often used interchangeably though many will distinguish between those features into which a surface stream flows and those which have no such input. Only the former would be described as sinks, swallow holes or swallets. A sinkhole on a glacier is termed a moulin or glacier mill.
As you can see in the video, the hole was larger than a street intersection, and as the reports say, the whole swallowed a three-story building and a house.
Back in 2007, a similar hole had opened in Guatemala, a 330-foot-deep sinkhole that had swallowed a dozen homes and forced the evacuation of nearly 1,000 people in a crowded Guatemala City neighborhood. Sam Bonis was part of a team of geologists who studied it.
What's worse?
This could happen again! "There is an excellent potential for this to happen again. It could happen almost anywhere in the city," added Bonis.
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