Weekend Economists Escape to Cuba March 15-17, 2013

[Demeter]

1. After Sinkhole Death, a Frenzy (Experts Say Unwarranted) Ensues

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/us/after-sinkhole-death-experts-say-unwarranted-frenzy-has-ensued.html

The recent bizarre death of a man who vanished into a huge sinkhole that opened beneath his home in suburban Tampa, Fla., unleashed a wave of sympathy, and not a little fear, among fellow Floridians. This is the so-called sinkhole season in Florida, a time when homes, cars and — rarely — people can drop into the abyss without warning. But for fans of sinkholes, of which there are more than one might think, this is a very good time, indeed.

Since the Florida tragedy, word has spread of another Tampa sinkhole and sinkholes in Allentown, Bethlehem and the suburban Philadelphia borough of Rockledge, Pa. The hole in Rockledge swallowed a creek and drained a duck pond (“Boom! It was gone overnight,” the town’s grounds manager was quoted as saying). There was a nine-acre sinkhole in Assumption Parish, La., that drew a visit from the environmental activist Erin Brockovich. The University of Delaware’s student newspaper, The Review, seized on the media frenzy to deliver comforting news: No sinkholes are likely in Delaware. (“Geologists unconcerned,” the headline read.) Just as sinkhole madness was starting to die down, a sinkhole no bigger than a manhole opened up last Friday on the 14th hole at Annbriar Golf Course in Waterloo, Ill., swallowing whole a 43-year-old mortgage broker. He was hauled out with what was initially reported to be a dislocated shoulder. But on Wednesday his friend and business partner, C.A. Schmidt, disclosed on Facebook that his shoulder actually had been broken in two places. “He’s pretty bummed — no golf the rest of the year for him,” Mr. Schmidt said in an e-mail exchange. There followed a sinkhole on Tuesday in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and a 17-foot-deep sinkhole discovered on Wednesday morning in Holyoke, Mass. Suddenly, it seemed that sinkholes were popping up, or down, on a daily basis. “The devil is taking down one person per day ... It could be you,” one poster on Twitter warned on Wednesday. According to geologists, this is because sinkholes have opened up on a daily basis for as long as anyone can remember. The difference is that nobody paid them much heed until now.

“I don’t believe we’re having any more today that we’ve had before,” Randall Orndorff, director of the Geology and Paleoclimate Science Center at the United States Geological Survey, said in an interview. “They happen all the time.”

Of course, he noted, there are sinkholes, and then there are man-made sinkholes. Real sinkholes occur when rain naturally transformed into weak carbonic acid eats away particularly susceptible underground rock like limestone or gypsum — also known as karst — creating underground holes. Man-made sinkholes are made the same way, only quicker. The Louisiana sinkhole is above a salt dome being mined by a brine-making company. All this is of intense interest to sinkhole enthusiasts. There is, for instance, 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 Thirteenth 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 presenting papers, holding discussions and looking for ways to reduce the possibility of man-made sinkholes. 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, which, for some attendees, could be a refreshing change of pace.

“Every time I’m in the country and see a sinkhole in an agricultural area, it almost always has an old refrigerator, an old washing machine or an old junk pickup truck that someone didn’t want to haul off to the salvage yard,” said Lewis Land, a New Mexico government karst hydrologist who is a conference organizer. “A sinkhole on a farmer’s property is almost like God has gifted him with a naturally occurring landfill.”