thecrashingisles Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-26010192 A sinkhole measuring 30ft (9m) deep has opened up on the driveway of a house in High Wycombe and swallowed a car.Nobody was inside the VW Lupo when the ground on Main Road in Walter's Ash gave way. The vehicle is still at the bottom covered in rubble. Firefighters said the hole was about 15ft (4.5m) diameter but left the scene after discovering no-one was inside. Wycombe District Council will now have to decide what steps to take next. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geezer466 Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 Will be all them secret coal mines around there!! Or maybe not!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bomberbrown Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 Wycombe District Council will now have to decide what steps to take next. Given this is on private land, I trust this involves contacting the home owner/landlords buildings insurance company insisting they make the area safe toot sweet! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scunnered Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 Obviously due to fracking. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StainlessSteelCat Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 I keep expecting some Godzilla like creature to come out of these sinkholes at some point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ulfar Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 Scunnered beat me too it. If this is from the test drilling for Fracking just imagine what happens when the whole of Lancashire disappears. The government will probably trumpet a shock reduction in the unemployed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R K Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 Stuff £375bn in t'hole. Job's a good 'un. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FallingAwake Posted February 2, 2014 Share Posted February 2, 2014 Hole-y cow! ...................................................................... I'll get me coat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SarahBell Posted February 3, 2014 Share Posted February 3, 2014 Scunnered beat me too it. If this is from the test drilling for Fracking just imagine what happens when the whole of Lancashire disappears. The government will probably trumpet a shock reduction in the unemployed. How close to Sellafield are they fracking? Would fracking release extra radon? http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/31/sellafield-radiation-alarm-radon-gas-nuclear-reprocessing Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecrashingisles Posted February 15, 2014 Author Share Posted February 15, 2014 And another one: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2560085/BREAKING-NEWS-House-left-teetering-brink-massive-sinkhole-35ft-wide-20ft-deep-opened-suburban-cul-sac.html A huge sinkhole has opened up in a suburban cul-de-sac, forcing 17 houses to be evacuated and leaving one home teetering on the brink of a 20ft drop.Police officers cordoned off the road in Hemel Hertforshire, Hertfordshire, after the 35ft-wide crater appeared at 7.30am following weeks of rain. A police spokesman said: 'The hole, which is in a residential cul de sac, has mainly affected the road. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scunnered Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 (edited) Not a sinkhole, but there was a 15-foot deep hole appeared in the central reservation of the M2 a few days ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-26143100 Lucky it wasn't in the middle of the carriageway ... Edited February 15, 2014 by Scunnered Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John51 Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 I can't remember hearing about sinkholes apart from the recent ones. Is there any history of them the UK? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snugglybear Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 I can't remember hearing about sinkholes apart from the recent ones. Is there any history of them the UK? Shamelessly lifted from the Grauniad In the language of geologists, the process that causes sinkholes is "the creation of a void which migrates towards the surface". In the language of the layman, when there's not enough solid stuff left underneath to support what is left of the loose stuff above, the whole lot collapses. The resulting depressions characterise what is known as a karst landscape, in which hundreds or even thousands of relatively small sinkholes form across an area that, seen from the air, can appear almost pock-marked.In Britain, the British Geological Survey says the carboniferous limestone of the Mendip Hills, the north of the South Wales coalfield, the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales, the northern Pennines and the edges of the Lake District all host well-developed karst landscapes. Karstic features are also common in the UK on the chalk of south-east England, on salt in the centre and north-east of the country, and particularly on the gypsum that underlies parts of eastern and north-eastern England, especially around Ripon and Darlington, and in the Vale of Eden. "Gypsum is the most soluble of all," says Cooper. "If you were to place a block of gypsum the size of a transit van in a river, it would dissolve completely within about 18 months." Ripon in North Yorkshire, Cooper says, is very susceptible to sinkholes, the most famous – some 20m deep – dating back to 1834. In 1997, four garages collapsed into a huge sinkhole that only just missed the front of a neighbouring house. One of the more spectacular recent British sinkholes, a 7.5m-deep crater, opened up in 2010 beneath a patio in Grays, Essex. "It was like an earthquake. There was a rumbling and we both ran out to look and there just a couple of steps away there was this monstrous hole," the house owner, Ben Luck, said at the time. "It was there in a second. There wasn't a bit of dust, and there was no sign of the crazy paving – it had all disappeared in the hole." Structural engineers said the hole was caused after water penetrated chalk some 25m down, causing tonnes of soil above it to shift. … [Cooper points out] ..since extremes of sinkhole-affecting weather – long periods of drought, for example, followed by spells of unusually heavy and persistent rain – are widely predicted to become more frequent as the Earth's climate changes, we would certainly expect there to be more sinkholes in the future. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rollover Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 Urban sinkholes are more common after heavy rain, because they are caused by water flowing through channels below ground and eroding away soil or soft rock like limestone. As the earth is carried into other parts of the ground large caverns can open up, usually unknown to the authorities or the people living above them. Once the cavern cannot support the weight of the topsoil above it, it collapses into the ground. One of the world's largest sinkholes, the Xiaozhai Tiankeng in China, is more than 2,000ft deep. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dweller Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 Sink Hole Swallows 8 cars in the US this week Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John The Pessimist Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 So now, not only is there a void below the surface of our house prices, there's a physical void below our houses.... The irony is delicious. Will they print paper paper £375 bn and throw it into the hole to prop up the houses? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rollover Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 So now, not only is there a void below the surface of our house prices, there's a physical void below our houses.... The irony is delicious. Will they print paper paper £375 bn and throw it into the hole to prop up the houses? To fill and fix the sinkhole is much cheaper, also less damage to the economy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wurzel Of Highbridge Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 It makes me chuckle that the English velieve that buildings last for eternity, when the truth is that they need a good rebuild (roof, kitchen, bathroom, flooring, insulation, heating, windows etc.) after about 30 years - and that's if your lucky! The Irish have the right Idea, you let the old house fall into a state of disrepair and after 50 years you build a nice spanking new energy efficient modern place with the cash you save on maintenance. I feel truly sorry for the people forced to live in crumbling, decaying and poorly insulated Victorian housing that is forced upon them by the government ad the ideological policy of no no new building outside an arbitrary boundary placed 50 years ago when the population of the UK was 50 million! How feckin stupid are the PTB? Lets all have a good chuckle at them! Cameron, you are the biggest joke the UK have ever produced and we all love to have a good laugh at you. You make Brown look like a genius - that's why your peers pushed you to the front of the pack where they did not want to be - indeed we are all laughing at you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
olliegog Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 the hemel hempstead 'hole' looks to be on a 'new' estate - wonder if they did a proper check on what lies beneath. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrPin Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 What a nice selling feature! I want one! Loads of crap just "gone", along with an "offensive wife". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sour Mash Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 the hemel hempstead 'hole' looks to be on a 'new' estate - wonder if they did a proper check on what lies beneath. Seems unlikely that this hole would be a complete one-off. I think the locals may well find that they are now living in a 'sink estate'. Wonder what it'll do for house prices locally? That said, people in general are so thick that they might just be stupid enough to ignore things like sinkholes or flooding in the neighbourhood in the scramble to 'get on the laddder'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dkujsbap Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 I don't see the problem. People have been asking for houses to be built on stilts after all the floods, well we've gone one better and just lowered the ground Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hectors House Posted February 17, 2014 Share Posted February 17, 2014 the hemel hempstead 'hole' looks to be on a 'new' estate - wonder if they did a proper check on what lies beneath. My friend used to live on a cul de sac on opposite side of the road to where this happened. Hemel Hempstead basically straddles two river valleys, this occurred on the hill (ridge) on the east side of town, being the Chilterns the hills are chalk so get a leaky storm drain then this will happen. Actually sink holes are very common in fields across the Chilterns, I know a farm where they have a couple of fields that over the years have had several collapses, last occurred during harvest when the ground opened up behind a Combine Harvester at work! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecrashingisles Posted February 18, 2014 Author Share Posted February 18, 2014 (edited) Now Yorkshire is collapsing too. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2561935/Three-houses-evacuated-25-foot-SINKHOLE-opens-Yorkshire-street.html "You can't go wrong with bricks and mortar." Edited February 18, 2014 by thecrashingisles Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R K Posted February 18, 2014 Share Posted February 18, 2014 Sink holes are the new terry wrists. Was one on the BBC news 'breaking news' ticker yesterday. "We're hearing that a sink hole has suddenly appeared in Ripon" Send the Army in!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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