===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer.

This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're going to get swallowed up by a topic we've had a few people suggest to us, sinkholes. Think of a sinkhole like a tiny, localized earthquake. But instead of shaking the ground like an earthquake, it does the scariest thing an earthquake could do besides topple a whole building on your head. The ground just opens up and devours you whole. And not just you. It might eat your friends, cars and nearby buildings. A big enough sinkhole could technically take down a city. Can they get that big? I have no idea. But if I've learned anything doing this show, it's that the worst-case scenario is not only possible, it's probably happened. So what is the deal with sinkholes? Is Mother Nature alive and hungry for human meat? Or is something else behind these sudden disasters? I'm putting money on something else. But like I said, anything is possible.

When are we? Now it is time for Time for Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I think this week for housekeeping, since last week's housekeeping was kind of stupidly long, we'll keep this week's housekeeping stupidly short. And we are going to celebrate that stupidly short housekeeping with a return of one of our favorite things to do on the show, Five Star Review Corner. You all know what it is, or maybe you don't, if this is the first episode you're listening to. But Five Star Review Corner is where we encourage you to leave five star reviews of the show, and only five star reviews. Fuck a four star review. I think I saw somebody left a one star review. Double fuck you.

I'll take that over for her.

At least they have passionate feelings about it.

Exactly, I want passion one way or the other.

But yeah, you leave five star reviews and we read some of them.

I would actually like to start with a review unrelated to our show.

Please, Ed, start with a review unrelated to the show.

Getting in a car accident at night on a highway, I give it one stars. I give it one stars because now, I mean, we're making this a short housekeeping, but it could actually be long. I got nowhere to be because I got all this PTSD about driving on highways at night now. And so I just drive during the day and or surface roads. So one star, one star for that. Now let's get to things we like. Let's get to the podcast.

All right, here we go. First five star review from Rick Belcher, September 1st, five stars, headline, Bunch Of Scaredy Cats. Rick says, I love this show. The Hose Boys consistently inform and entertain. I was a little late to the party, but I've caught up over the last few weeks and I can't wait for the next episode to drop. So thank you, Rick.

Oh, nice. So we're the Hose Boys?

We're the Hose Boys.

Okay, we'll take it.

I like that.

Yeah, it's nice. It's blended.

I've been soft launching Square Boys, but we aren't Square yet. I think we can just go with Hose Boys.

No, since I haven't worked, I haven't been to the gym since like a week before the accident. So I like I can't I I'm the fucking doughboy now, dude.

You're you. Yeah. You're almost a flat boy after the accident. But that's true.

I'm actually that's still a goal. Flat boy still a goal.

Yeah.

But it is not not that way.

Yeah. All right. And hit me with a five star review.

All right. Five star. We are Mandy Blum, Mandy Blom. They write subject five stars every week. Exclamation point. Nice to see. RIP. God bless to my previous favorite podcast. Scared All Time takes the cake as my number one. Been listening since day one and it never gets old. Well, that was very nice of them. They were really on top of punctuation till the end. But I do like that it, I guess there's more to come, which I like to see in a review.

Yeah. I'll give you this five star review from Lil Becks on July 30th. Five stars, a spooky good time. This is why I'm reading this one. It starts with, listen, I'm very picky when it comes to podcasts. This one is a 10 out of 10 for me. Audio quality is always great.

Hey, right on, finally somebody. I work so hard on this.

Good job, Ed. Thank you. Hosts are hilarious. Topics are always fun and well researched. Every episode is like a spooky little vacation for my brain. That's the spirit. I like that.

That sure is. That's very nice of them. But if we want to keep getting five star reviews, we shouldn't have long housekeeping.

So that's true.

Let's get into it.

Let's get into it. Here we go. sinkholes, episode two, season four. Let's get into it. All right, Ed. So we've had a couple of people request sinkholes. And to be totally honest, I wouldn't say sinkholes have ever really been on my fear tier. Do you think about sinkholes often? Are you worried about them?

I never think about them.

Okay, great. So we're starting on the same page. Never concerned. I mean, that's like I said in the intro, the closest I get is like an earthquake. I feel like in scary earthquake movies, it's usually the 1970s earthquake of like a big crack opens up. And then the ground shakes and it gets bigger. And then people fall in and cars fall in.

Like that's what I think of in terms of like, yeah, like it's before, like there's something that causes it. Like an earthquake causes the ground to open, where I feel like, and I don't know, maybe this is not true at all, but I feel like a sinkhole is its own thing. It's kind of maybe more akin to quicksand or something or a sarlacc pit.

Yeah. This might be the stupidest we've sounded at the beginning of an episode.

We don't know how sinkholes work.

I don't know. We're literally, this is like an audience request episode.

Yeah. I know my brother, I think in his neighborhood, somebody built a pool or something, and I don't know if they did it wrong or if they didn't. For whatever reason, somebody built a pool, and now other neighbors' driveways are starting to sink in and turn at an angle. Other people's yards are collapsing because somebody built a pool. So I don't know if that has anything to do with sinkholes.

It might. We'll learn about what causes sinkholes in a moment, and it sounds like, without spoiling it, it sounds like there may be some of that going on with this pool situation.

Oh no.

I thought I'd start by telling our listeners that the first two words I think of when I hear the word sinkhole are Lake Taco, not Tahoe, Taco. It's not a vacation place ruined by a sinkhole, though I feel like there's a potential business model there. Like, when this podcast blows up, maybe we should invest in food-themed vacation spots, like Lake Taco or Pasta Mountain.

I don't think we should. I don't think we should invest in anything themed.

Or Burrito Bay. Fuck, dude. Burrito Bay.

It's a fun name.

Burrito Bay sounds like heaven.

Remember we covered in Abandoned Towns? There was the Santa Claus Town or whatever and stuff. I just feel like you shouldn't dump a bunch of investment into a themed anything.

That's true. That's true.

Not when it comes to a themed location. I don't know. People, I guess, made money on that museum of ice cream or some dumb shit, so who knows?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we've learned some lessons from this show.

We have nothing to invest.

We have nothing to invest. If all of our patrons want to go in with us and buy Burrito Bay, let's talk.

All our patrons together might buy us a burrito.

Well, in this case, Lake Taco is the name for the sinkholes that opened up in front of the Taco Bell near my in-laws in wilkes County, North Carolina, where I wrote and researched this episode. I put a link in the show notes if you want to see a post on a local Facebook page about it that is full of local comments like this gem, quote, still remember this, I was hollering at this nice looking shawty that lived right up the road. Me and her had our own sinkhole action going on. Know what I'm saying? Upside down smiley face, three right side up smiley faces.

Oh wow.

So this sinkhole appeared outside the wilkesboro Taco Bell in February 2017.

Which one, the real sinkhole or the one that guy's talking about? Like his own personal sinkhole?

The real sinkhole.

Oh, okay, okay.

Although this guy's sinkhole action may have happened outside of the wilkesboro Taco Bell, it's possible.

Sure, sure.

The real sinkhole appeared outside the wilkesboro Taco Bell in February 2017. And according to a video produced by the wilkes County Democrats, the sinkhole was created when a 60 inch metal culvert, at least 35 feet below the Taco Bell, was damaged by a shifting boulder. That led to problems with storm water runoff and that in turn created the sinkholes. And on February 12th, the front of the two sinkholes expanded overnight, taking a car into what became a 20 foot hole. The Taco Bell closed that summer, the building remained abandoned with a large sinkhole filled with water in front of it. Torrential rains hit that June filling it even further and thus Lake Taco was born. Wow. According to Mickey Minton, which is a great comic book name, who is also a Facebook commenter, they pinned the blame on JC. Faw and company, but it was a failed storm drainpipe buried under there and not maintained by the town, county or state. It was not his fault that they messed up, but since it was his property, they got away with it. Just not right.

No.

I mean, yes, he could be a bit of a shortcut kind of boss, but not this time.

Look, I feel for him a little bit. As a guy dealing with insurance a lot the last week or two, whenever this comes out, insurance companies, they're probably like, saw your franchise turn into a lake, here's one dollar.

Yeah. I don't know. I asked my father-in-law about JC. Faw and he had some strong opinions on JC. Faw and JC. Faw's foibles.

Oh my God.

This man is not well loved locally.

Is his name Just Cheap Fawz?

Hey, there you go. I also heard JC. Faw is dead, so we can say whatever the fuck we want about him.

Oh yeah, dude. Take that, JC.

Take that, JC dancing on your motherfucking grave.

Yeah, adios, dude. Hope your grave isn't a sinkhole.

Well, even better, and really the reason I bring all this up in the first place, is that this particular sinkhole got a song written about it by a local DJ who goes by the name Timmy Nelson.

Gotta have a better DJ name than that.

I know, the song is called Taco River for some reason, instead of Taco Lake.

I guess he's, yeah, he's anticipating there'd be more bodies of water.

Yeah, but Ed, I just sent you a link.

Oh, okay, sure.

Hit play on that bop, and take a listen to Taco River by Timmy Nelson.

Okay, he has a binder clip holding his, I don't know what that is, a rug?

I believe he's dressed as a Mexican would be, I think, an interpretation of this video.

Okay, so I'm looking at an older kind of parrot-headish white guy. I may be a white guy, who fucking knows? It's shot with a fucking potato, so it's hard to tell his ethnicity. But he is dressed in a, I don't know, a mix of a couple different.

He has a mariachi hat on, sunglasses, I believe maybe fake teeth? His teeth look very fake to me.

Fuck, behind him is just like maybe news footage from Taco Lake. And a lower third popped up that says this is Taco Lake, so he's very aware of the name of this place and yet continues to call it Taco River.

Yeah, I'm not sure. I think maybe that just worked best for the song lyrics.

Oh, I'm sure it did. There's no, you can't rhyme anything with Lake.

The song's nearly five minutes long.

Okay, now there's a section where he's just kinda talking. Like he's the Ink Spots or Bob Dylan or something.

Maybe just throw it out to dry for the wind and I'll catch it as it floats by.

Okay, I will say towards, I don't know, the four and a half minute mark of the video, he's laying on the ground now, but before he did, he got a little closer to the camera. yes, they are gigantic fake teeth. I don't know if it's like a racist thing or just a, I don't know why anything. I don't know why anything is all I could say about this video.

Well, anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed that clip. Shout out to wilkesboro, North Carolina and Lake Taco. I hope someone cleans you up soon or massively expands you so I can take a jet ski out next time I'm in town.

And sorry everybody who's listening at home for us forgetting that you're not in the room with us, but we'll have a link to the video and some screenshots of this tone deaf local loon in the show notes for sure.

That's the most recent experience I've had with a sinkhole. So not scary is part of what I'm getting at, but as I learned researching this episode, sinkholes can in fact be very scary. So I guess we'll start with why are sinkholes? What causes sinkholes? According to the US Geological Service, a sinkhole is a depression in the ground that has no natural external surface drainage. Basically, this means that when it rains, all of the water stays inside the sinkhole and typically drains into the subsurface. sinkholes are most common in what geologists call karst terrain, which I think we talked about karst terrain in the caves episode.

Maybe.

Because these are regions where the types of rock below the land can naturally be dissolved by groundwater circulating through them, which is sometimes how caves are formed. So some of this soluble rock includes salt beds and domes, gypsum, limestone and other carbonate rock. So Florida, for instance, is an area largely underlain by limestone and is highly susceptible to sinkholes, a point that we will return to again and again over the course of this episode.

Florida has a lot of marshland too, which seems like that's, I don't know, it just seems like what if we put what's going on in a sinkhole on the surface? You know what I mean? It's just wet, weird, awful, don't go there.

Yeah, well, I think a lot of marshland probably is, I don't know what the, I guess it doesn't-

doesn't drain.

Have the same drainage issues. Yeah, it just kind of hangs out. But when water from rainfall moves down through the soil, the soluble rock can dissolve, creating underground spaces and caverns. these caverns can then grow to the point that there isn't enough support for the land above them, at which point they collapse, taking anything above ground with them.

But where does it go?

Into the ground.

To where? To hell?

It goes straight to hell. No, so imagine it's essentially forming in a similar way to a cave, but in an area close enough to the surface that the weight of the surface collapses through the ceiling of the hole that has been formed beneath the ground.

Got you. So it's like if you're upstairs neighbors, bathtub overran, and then the water got so heavy that it broke down into your apartment. I guess then-

Kind of.

All of this doesn't make sense. Look, there will be diagrams on the website. I don't know.

It's simply-

Simply the best. Boom, boom, boom.

It's simply water that is not draining into a river, a stream, filtering through the ground and then below ground running into, let's just say, limestone and eating through the limestone and then eventually there's a big enough hole formed beneath the ground that it can no longer support the ground above it.

Sure. So the ground has fallen into the first floor apartment then. Got it. The first floor apartment of Earth.

The apartment metaphor doesn't quite work because a first floor apartment would already be mostly open space.

Fine. Into the- It doesn't matter. None of this matters. All we know is that at any moment, this can happen.

At any moment, the ground can fall out from beneath you and you can disappear into hell. There's no database of sinkhole collapses in the US. So it's hard to say how many happen each year. But we do know that sinkhole damages over the last 15 years cost, on average, at least $300 million per year.

Oh, that's some Geico number.

Ed's really got it out for insurance companies. There's going to be a lot of insurance comments throughout this episode. It's a complex system. The estimate of $300 million per year is probably much lower than the actual cost, since a lot of sinkholes and related damage probably go unreported, either because people aren't aware that it was a sinkhole, or it happened way out in the woods beneath an old barn or something, and there was no money to recoup. So in any case, $300 million a year is a lot of money per year for a problem that isn't closely tracked. I guess maybe since it's hard to predict when and where a sinkhole might happen, and many of them probably happen in places where no one is observing them, it's a little like if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around. A sinkhole is not really a problem unless it happens somewhere populated.

Yeah. Then you better hope you have sinkhole insurance or whatever, which is probably $13 billion a year spent on sinkhole insurance. They only pay out $300 million. Okay, it's the last time I'm bringing up.

I'm not going to look up right now. Is there such a thing as sinkhole insurance? yes, there is. You can get it from Value Penguin. Oh no, Value Penguin is a site that writes about insurance. progressive says, a standard homeowner policy doesn't offer sinkhole insurance coverage, but you may be able to purchase a rider or endorsement for sinkhole damage. So it's not considered an act of God. It is something you can be insured against. So that's cool. That's good. When sinkholes happen away from populated areas, they can result in some of the most beautiful formations in the world. In fact, the world's deepest sinkhole, known as the Heavenly Pit in Fengjie County of Shaanxiang Municipality in China, is one of those places. According to the BBC, this sinkhole measures 2,165 feet or 660 meters deep and has a volume of 130 million cubic meters or about 4.5 billion cubic feet. I don't know how big that is, but I assume you could probably fit a couple of Lake Tacos in there.

Oh yeah, Lake Taco looked pretty small behind that culturally insensitive musician.

Yeah. So, you know I love an infographic, and I try to find ways on this show to compare big numbers to things that you can get your brain around, because four and a half billion cubic square feet is a made up number. It might as well be a made up number. You can't really imagine it. So, I try to find things that fit in four and a half billion cubic feet, but it's such a large number that there wasn't much out there. So here's what I settled on. I found an infographic that says a beer keg is about two cubic feet. So, you could fit two and a quarter billion beer kegs into the four and a half billion cubic feet of the heavenly pit, but that's not helpful unless you can visualize more than a billion beer kegs, which I cannot.

So, you didn't party, bro. It's like you never partied.

It's like I could do four and a half billion keg stands. You don't even know, bro.

Yeah, I mean, that old you could have.

Here's something that does, it's still too big to really comprehend, but it helps put that number in a perspective. So, I looked it up, Anheuser-Busch only produces about 125 million barrels or kegs of beer each year. So, it would take the boys at Budweiser 36 years of constantly brewing beer to fill that sinkhole with beer kegs.

That helps, yeah.

It's so big that it is home to 1,285 different plant and animal species, just the heavenly pit alone, not the woods around it. The woods contained within the heavenly pit is home to 1,285 plant and animal species, including the rare ginkgo plant, the clouded leopard and the chinese giant salamander.

Wow.

Which, depending on how giant it is, I don't know, maybe you can only fit four of them in there.

Oh, shit. Do they all work at some sort of iPhone factory in the pit, or how does that?

No, no.

What's going on with this pit? I don't know where it is in China.

Yeah, I don't know where the Chongqing, the Chongqing municipality is. I did include pictures of this in the show notes. And actually, because these are all sinkholes, there's a lot of pictures in the show notes, but you can also just Google most of them. If you have trouble finding the links or you don't want to go to the links, you can just Google heavenly pit China and you'll find photos of it. During the area's rainy season, a waterfall plummets from the mouth of the pit, feeding an underground river and cave network at its base. Locals have known about this sinkhole for centuries, but the outside world only became aware of it in 1994 when British explorers attempted to map the cave system. And adding to the site's mystery, the river's torrent was so heavy that it was too much for this British team of explorers. They attempted to map it five times over the course of 10 years, but they never succeeded in producing a complete survey. So as a result, the deep dark underworld of Heavenly Pits River remains one of China's great geological mysteries. No one has a map. I mean, I'm sure someone in China does, but no one outside of China has a map of where those rivers come from or go to. They just apparently have a very heavy flow to them because it was too much for the Brits.

Yeah. What isn't?

Yeah. A lot of Eastern countries were too much for the Brits, ultimately.

Shots fired. Must get shots fired.

There's another massive, beautiful sinkhole that I get. I encourage you to go Google image search this. It's a sinkhole in Bolivar State, Venezuela called the SEMA Humboldt. It is 352 meters or 1,155 feet wide, and 314 meters or 1,030 feet deep with vertical walls. And it's unusual looking. If you look this up, this even more so than the heavenly pit, it just looks fake. It is a perfectly round hole punched in the middle of a rainforest. And this one's even crazier because it formed at the top of one of the only forested Tapuys in the world. Now, if you don't know what a Tapuys is, join the club. I didn't either. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing it correctly. I'm pretty sure I am. But a Tapuys is one of those, you've seen pictures of them on like National Geographic Channel or travel sites. They're one of those flat top mountains that looks like something out of a fantasy movie.

Oh yeah, sure, sure.

They drop straight off into cliffs on all sides. It looks like a place where if dinosaurs were still going to be here, they would be on top of one of these places.

Got you.

Even creepier though, this particular Tapuys is called Cerro Serra Senyama, named after the tale of the local Yakuana people about an evil spirit living in caves up in the mountain and devouring human flesh with the sound sorry, sorry, s-a-r-i, sorry, sorry. I don't know what that sound has to do with eating human flesh.

Yeah, I don't know either.

I've never even eaten a hamburger with that noise.

No, that is a... I guess McDonald's. Did you see that thing about how McDonald's is like, everyone's skimping on everything right now, and so that lady had that video of the pickles thicker than the meat in the McDonald's hamburger?

No, what is this?

I'm just saying, they're making thin ass burgers over there, so if anybody's food should be saying sorry to you, it should be fucking McDonald's burgers for how little meat they got in there at the moment.

Well, if you go up onto this mountain, make sure you bring some burgers no matter how thin they are. Maybe you can trade the evil spirits for your own flesh by giving them a tasty, delicious McDonald's hamburger. The closest road to Cerro Sere Sanyama is 35 miles away. So no one even knew this sinkhole was up here on top of this tepui because no one had flown over it and looked down until 1954 or possibly 1961. I found some conflicting dates, but literally that's kind of the only way. I mean, I'm sure at some point in history, there were some people in the area who knew that this thing was up there, but it took people flying over the tepui and looking down and going, what the fuck is that? Before anyone knew that it even existed.

Yeah, I hope it started with some guy being like, I built the most beautiful home, where on top of that tepui? And it was like, where? He's like, on top of the, we're looking and I promise you, I see no home up there. He's like, what are you talking about? I spent like six years building this house. Then I walked 35 miles of this road to tell you about it.

Oh no.

And then they go up there and yeah, it's just one of those things where it's like, this is the worst possible place. And then of course, it didn't have sinkhole insurance.

Yeah. Should have talked to progressive or State Farm.

Or that penguin.

Or a virtual penguin or whatever. So 1954 and 1961, either way, mid-century, some guy who probably shot down Nazis in a dogfight a few years prior.

Hell yeah, brother.

Flew over this thing and went, I gotta get down there. And there's actually two obviously visible sinkholes from the air. There's Sima Humboldt and then another one called Sima Martell. And I think there's a total of like four or five up there, but Humboldt's the big one that everyone's taken a photo of. Neither of these sinkholes were explored until the summit of Sarisaranyama was finally reached in 1974 when a helicopter was used to airlift 30 researchers to the top of the plateau. Initial investigations were done at both sinkholes, including a descent to the bottom of Sima Humboldt, where they again, just like the heavenly pit, found an entire forest and ecosystem.

It's so wild.

Which is crazy to me. It's an ecosystem at the bottom of a sinkhole that's already like how many hundreds of, or thousands of feet in the air are living in this little pit and have been for millions of years.

I mean, do they grow in the pit or is it just the top soil that fell into the pit is now in there like if you pulled a tablecloth and all the flowers kept standing, you know, from under all the plates and everything stayed where it was like, whoa, that was crazy, huh? They all like the trees all turned to each other. I was like, I just fell like 50 feet. Are you good, bro? And he's like, yeah, this is where we live now. We live down here now.

I'm sure wouldn't it.

Or do they all grow like after the collapse or were they already down there and the collapse revealed them like they live in an egg?

No, they were living in an egg. Okay.

I don't know.

They weren't living in an egg. I imagine when the collapse initially happened, it took a lot of trees and nature with it, a lot of which probably anything living animal wise, I'm sure perished on impact. But over the years, trees grew back, plants grew back and other animals found their way down there.

Search party found their loved ones?

Yeah. Currently access to Sarisaranyama is restricted to scientific researchers and I'm pretty sure that's because they actually did find dinosaurs up there.

I bet some journey to the center of the earth shit went on.

Yeah, really. You can't go up there, only very specific, highly credentialed researchers. I would kill to go up there. It looks absolutely beautiful and very strange. But look, let's be real. You, dear listener, you are not here to listen to stories about the beautiful places sinkholes can become. You want death and disaster. So let's take a look at seven of the scariest sinkhole disasters in recent memory, or as I call them, the seven deadly sinks.

Oh wow.

Hey.

Love it.

I'm gonna be a dad soon, so I gotta get the dad jokes going. So this first story comes to us from, guess where, Florida. It's self a land of nightmares. Jeff Bush, and I put this one first because I think this and one other one later are kind of like, I think what people are most afraid of when it comes to sinkholes. Because in this situation, in this case, Jeff Bush, a 37 year old husband and father was in his bedroom on February 28th, 2013, when the earth opened up beneath him, swallowing him and everything in his room whole.

But what was Jeb Bush doing? Was he still the governor at that time? No, probably not.

2013, I don't know. I think that might have been Charlie Crist territory.

Okay.

2013, I can't be sure. The whole was about 20 feet wide and had almost been completely hidden by the house as it grew and shifted. So this particular hole seems like it had been there a while getting bigger, falling apart and eventually took the house into it. The five other people in the home escaped unharmed. So Jeb maybe was one of them. Jeff Bush's brother, Jeremy Bush, the brave Bush, tried to save his brother by jumping into the hole, but then had to be rescued himself. He's quoted by My Fox Tampa Bay as saying, I ran in there and heard somebody screaming, my brother screaming, and I ran in there and all I see is this big hole. All I see is the top of his bed. I didn't see anything else, so I jumped in the hole and tried getting him out. The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn't care. I wanted to save my brother. I could hear him screaming for me, hollering for me. I couldn't do nothing. If you go to the Daily Mail link I put in the show notes, you can see some photos of what the room looked like after the sinkhole opened up, and it is scary to how localized to the bedroom it is. It looks like Daffy Duck used a saw from below, like around the perimeter of the room. It was just like, whoop.

Oh my God.

Like it's just the bedroom.

Did he find his brother?

No. Oh no. No, they never found his body.

And he was hollering at the shawties down there?

He was maybe hollering at the shawties. Jeff was down there somewhere, alive, and I guess getting pulled deeper and deeper into the earth being covered by more dirt and yelling for his brother. I mean, I'll go optimistic, and maybe this was a complex scheme to fake his own death and start life over in Hollow Earth, in which case RIP, God bless Jeff, down there riding dinosaurs and doing battle with Morlocks.

Probably riding some dinosaurs.

I think so. But three days later, the search for Jeff Bush's body was called off as the ground was considered too unstable and dangerous to continue. The house was raised, nearby homes were evacuated, and two years later, the hole reopened. The land is now fenced off and it serves as a memorial to Jeff, which I got to admit looks pretty weird in aerial shots. It's just a fence around what looks like very well maintained grass with a giant hole in the middle of it. Oh, wow. According to Sandy nettles, a geology consultant in Tampa, there is hardly a place in Florida that's immune to sinkholes. So get that sinkhole insurance. Just know that before you go down there to the land of opportunity.

Yeah, you'll park your fanboat and then go to bed and come out to no fanboat. There is nothing safe there from the sinkholes.

So the second deadly sink, the only thing worse than a sinkhole in your bedroom is a sinkhole that eats your entire house or apartment building or neighborhood. And that's what happened not once, but twice in Guatemala. The first of these man-eating sinkholes struck in 2007. It's nearly 300 feet deep and almost as wide. And it killed at least five people in a poor neighborhood of Guatemala City. The images of the aftermath are shocking. Sort of like the sinkhole at the top of the Tupui, it is a perfectly cylindrical hole punched into the middle of the city with roads and buildings just kind of teetering right on the edge. You've probably seen a photo of this sinkhole. If you ever looked up sinkholes on the internet, you've probably seen a photo of this one floating around. It looks crazy, like someone just drilled a perfect circle the size of a city block into the earth.

Aren't there no such things as perfect circles in nature? People say that, right? But then also circle comes up a lot. We have fairy rings, we have sinkholes. Like circles be circling, they're just imperfect.

Yeah, I mean here, I'm gonna send you, here's the link to a bunch of images of the Guatemala sinkholes.

What the fuck? This looks like Photoshopped.

Yeah, no, but it's not, it's not. It is literally just a giant, I mean, the only thing that would make it scarier would be if it had teeth, if it was literally a Sarlacc pit.

Yeah, wow. And this has like, they just have like tarps over it and shit, like yeah. Well, you know what though, not one wet floor sign type of thing though, just tarps. They really should be caution taping this off, but nope, just laid some tarps into it.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely one of the scariest sinkhole photos I've ever seen. In the days following this initial collapse, over a thousand people were evacuated from the area because officials feared that the sinkhole might grow even larger, which if it got any larger, it would just be swallowing the whole city.

Yeah, I do wonder about that.

I guess it could take a few more buildings.

Yeah, I do wonder about that because it's like, I didn't see a picture of it, but you said they built the fence around Jeff's little sinkhole or whatever. And it's like, okay, what's the perimeter on that? Like, we gotta keep the fence 25 feet from it. Like, what's the thing where we feel comfortable that the ground is gonna be hard enough and good enough that it won't now move out to that space? Because there's like buildings and stuff right up on this sinkhole in the Guatemalan photo. And I'd have to be like, okay, I need a 50, I mean, I would like it to be 50 miles, but we need like a 500 foot perimeter so like no one should go near this. I mean, that's how I would, I mean, I couldn't build a big enough fence around this fucking hole after.

Yeah. Well, here's the photo of Jeff's memorial. And I'm sure that these are the kinds of sinkholes that people are keeping an eye on to see if.

Okay. Yeah. Jeff, it's pretty, they built like a pretty big square around it. Like you're not, it's not right up on it. Yeah.

Yeah. And I'm sure there's the ability to, on some level, when you get one of these sinkholes, once you know where there's a problem, you can keep an eye on and investigate the surrounding areas. I'm sure there's sort of some kind of ground penetrating radar that you can use to see if there's holes forming beneath the earth nearby. I mean, I guess for better or for worse, once one of these opens up, the rainwater has plenty of places to go because it's just going to drain into the...

Yeah, true. And you can throw a couple of koi in there, make a little pond.

Yeah. I mean, make lemonade out of a sinkhole full of lemons. So in any case, the Guatemalan government declared a state of emergency in this entire area while they investigated. And since Guatemala City is apparently, I don't know, cursed by an ancient evil, another massive sinkhole opened up three years after this one. Wow. Not in the same part of town, but according to Atlas Obscura, this next one was 65 feet across and 30 stories deep. It killed 15 people and ate a three-story tall factory.

I don't like that they refer to it as ate. Like it's hungry.

A lot of these articles refer to the sinkholes as devouring, eating.

interesting.

Yeah. I mean, it does feel like the earth is just like, oh, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.

But some of these pictures, even the chinese ones, which feel very natural, because the pictures of the chinese ones were elemental versus the pictures of the Guatemala one where it's like, look at this man-made city of right angles that somebody has just shot a fucking laser through. Like, it looks like a laser from space just came down and like just put like a, not a perfect circle as we've established, but just like a stray shot from a fucking intergalactic war happening.

Yeah.

Accidentally hit Guatemala city and we're all just supposed to act like it's a sinkhole.

True. It could be a cover up. Maybe sinkholes are space lasers.

Yeah. And I'm sure we're going to have to go to work when that fucking tesla Elon shot out into space all those years ago. Hit some fucking civilization. It makes their 911. Yeah. And then you have to be like, oh shit, what are we going to say? Not us. I mean, whoever is on that planet will have to have a cover up for it.

Yeah. Well, what officials found in both cases, supposedly, although I like our new theory better, but supposedly in both these cases, the sinkholes were likely caused by a combination of factors, including heavy rain and leaky sewer pipes underground. Guatemala City is built on volcanic pumice, a soft rock that is easily eroded by water. So over time, that constant flow of leaky pipes and heavy rain just hollows out the ground beneath the street, creating a massive underground hole. That's why this cracked me up. Some people argue that the Guatemala sinkholes aren't technically sinkholes, but I shit you not, piping features, which I don't know, man, your dad's a plumber. Would he consider a 300 foot deep and wide hole a piping feature?

Feature how? Like it makes it easier to pipe or like this is what we had planned from the piping?

I don't know. I just read in one of the articles that I was researching this that one, I don't know if it was the government. Somebody was arguing that these were piping features, which I don't understand. I don't understand what on earth, because I guess it makes the most sense that you'd be like, oh, well, it's a feature of piping, which is when we pipe through these soft rock areas, this is a feature that will form, which is, I guess, true, but seems like both really bad urban planning and a really a stretch of an argument.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the person making that argument is the insurance company doesn't want to pay out the sinkhole insurance.

Yeah, probably.

And they're like, oh, this is clearly a piping feature. You can't.

I mean, obviously, if I were to hire a planner to pipe my home, I would expect this. I would expect it. I would welcome it.

Oh my God. What'd you say? You said you found pipes in there? You said you found pipes in there? Right there, bro.

Feature, not a bug. Feature, not a bug.

I'm sorry, but you didn't have the pipe addendum on your sinkhole insurance or whatever. So you're shit out of luck.

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. 300 feet dead at the bottom of a sinkhole. The third Deadly Sink. This one, Ed is a car guy. We were just on our live episode, if any of you were there a few weeks ago now, you heard Scott Philbrook from Astonishing Legends talking to Ed about being a gearhead. And as a gearhead, this one might be the worst one yet. No one died, but some car collector souls certainly did. In February 2014, a sinkhole opened up under the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The 45-foot-wide, 30-foot-deep hole swallowed eight classic corvettes, including, Ed, this may mean something to you, it didn't mean anything to me, but including a 1962, quote, black Corvette, a 1984 PPG Pace Car, a 2009 ZR1 Blue Devil, the 1992 white 1 millionth Corvette, you can let that one go, a 1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette, a 2001 Mallet Hammer Z06 Corvette, the 2009 white 1.5 millionth Corvette, which doesn't seem as impressive as the 1 millionth, but they got both of them, and ending on the least impressive sounding, a 1993 ZR1 Spider.

Yeah, I mean, anything in the 90s, you can just let them go into a hole, I don't care. Maybe the black Corvette's significance is, it really wasn't a pick, a color people chose a lot. I think it was called Tuxedo Black or something, but black cars weren't cool until way later, I feel like. I don't know, RIP got blessed to those cars, I guess. I mean, corvettes, they made a lot of them.

They all sound very fancy and expensive. All told, it was about a million dollars in damage to the cars and five million dollars of damage total, including what it costs to repair the sinkhole. And the photos of the aftermath of this accident, or I guess it's not an accident, it's a sinkhole. The photos of the aftermath of the disaster are crazy. They kind of look like closeups someone took of hot wheels stuffed into a hole, because your brain doesn't quite comprehend how all this fancy steel and glass is stacked on top of each other, covered in dirt, just sitting in a hole. They're weird looking. If you're a car fan who's a real glutton for punishment, make sure to check out the security video of the sinkhole opening up that I put in the show notes. Wow. Unlike most sinkholes, this one formed on video, and so the link in the show notes is actually a YouTube clip of a local news story that has the security footage in the news story. Because I found a clip of just the sinkhole opening itself, but I thought it was a little better with some context because it's not a very long clip.

Well, I will say in the most American way ever, I've Googled this and I now see exactly what you're talking about how it all just looks like matchbox cars and stuff because it's in a dome and all that stuff. But it's now been converted into the Corvette cave-in exhibit, the Skydome sinkhole experience.

yes, that's kind of a happy ending because they've managed to turn it into an exhibit, like kind of a little event. They have an interactive display about the sinkhole, and there's a manhole cover that lets visitors look into a recreation of the sinkhole.

I'd kind of be like, hey, is this fine now? Like, are we supposed to be here? Like, it seemed like-

They filled it.

Don't show me the security cam footage as I'm walking into the sinkhole exhibit.

Yeah, they're like, you are here, right where the floor collapsed and took $5 million worth of cars into the ground.

People all the time say like, I want to be buried with my car. Well, there you go.

Here you go, here's your chance.

Come to the sinkhole exhibit.

There's a guy in the video, this is maybe my favorite thing. There's a guy in that news footage marveling that this is actually PR that Corvette could never even pay for because apparently, after they pulled a bunch of these cars back up to the surface, after falling 30 feet deep into the earth, they pulled these cars up and they turned on like nothing happened.

Oh, well.

So Corvette makes up not just a nice looking car, but it can take a beating.

Hey, the Corvette that caused the multi-car accident I was in, it drove away.

Well, that's-

It fucking drove away from the accident.

That's what I told you on the live show with Scott that one of the reasons that accident was so weird is we'd just done Sudden Death, and then I had just finished researching Corvette Cave-In, and then you were in a Sudden Death moment caused by a Corvette.

That's correct.

A little weird, a little weird.

A little synchronicity this season so far. Hopefully, we don't do it. We should do the rest of the season as like being afraid of getting a bunch of money from nothing.

Or we should do the rest of the show real quick this season before we fall into a sinkhole.

Oh my God. Yeah, I forgot about that. We've already had two come true.

This sucks.

We should never have done what this is.

We'll put the fear of falling into a large amount of money. We'll put that one in the chamber and see if we can get any synchronicities lining up on that one.

Yeah, for real.

But that takes us to the fourth Deadly Sink. This one makes the list because no one should have to deal with a sinkhole on vacation, especially at Disney World.

What?

But that's exactly what happened on August 11th, 2015. A sinkhole opened up at the Summer Bay resort near Disney World in Florida. Because again, like I said, we will be returning to Florida over and over again. As we noted before, maybe stay away from Florida. The sinkhole was 60 feet wide and 15 feet deep, which isn't too bad if the three-story building it started to swallow wasn't connected to a second three-story building that then collapsed as the first sank deeper and deeper into the ground.

Wait, does this, I remember, this isn't that like apartment building collapse like by my, no, that was by Miami. This is different.

No, yeah, that was a different, that was a different, I know what you're talking about. That was a different one.

This is, okay, sure.

This had, there were 35 vacation guests inside these buildings when they started to go down. Everyone managed to get out safely.

Oh wow, so it's a slow sinkhole.

It was, it took quite a long time, about 40 minutes for the entire building to come down. But I just, I can't even, like, as I may have just revealed for the first time earlier, I'm about to have a kid. Can you imagine you get to the resort at Disneyland, you finally get your kid quiet, maybe you've turned on some Jimmy Buffett or a History Channel documentary about mustard gas or whatever, and you're settling down with a little beverage, and over the course of about 40 minutes, you start hearing, like, banging and cracking sounds, and you're like, what the fuck is that? And then it turns out it's the entire building getting sucked into a sinkhole.

Sure.

Not a vacation.

Well, don't worry, you're not gonna have the money to go on vacation anytime soon.

resort guest Maggie Tamri told the local news she sensed trouble before the collapse.

What, has she fucked at the Long Island medium?

She might have been. No, she had a much more direct and clear reason to sense trouble. She said, I was walking into the room, and I heard bang, bang, bang and glass breaking. And I ran back to the car and I told my family, we have three toddlers with us, I told my family, jump in the car, I have a bad feeling. I thought someone was getting into an altercation.

I mean, I do appreciate that. People who get shot are people who stand around.

But who's getting into an altercation? The fucking Hulk?

Yeah.

If the building is shaking and glass is breaking, I don't know what kind of fights you're used to hearing.

Yeah, she's used to some Percy Jackson shit right there.

Yeah. The fifth deadly sink is a shorty, but a truly deadly one. A couple of these haven't really been all that deadly. This one's deadly. There's not much information on it, but I've included it because I think it's sort of the platonic ideal of devastating sinkhole death. And you can watch it happen live on camera. Ed, I have another link for you that I've included in the show notes.

Oh boy. Okay.

Click this link and you'll be transported Oh, what? to August 2nd, 2012 on a street in Taiwan.

Did I just see someone die?

yes.

Why did you send me this?

Well, I mean, to be clear to people just listening, you don't really see him die. You see him disappear.

I mean, it is implied.

It's implied.

Heavily.

It's implied. It's called raw video. Taiwan man falls into a huge sinkhole.

He sure does. And then as they're doing the news after, it would be like, here's where the man fell in. It's falling apart more.

Yeah.

Like behind them.

He's just walking around and it's one of those security videos that's like five frames per second.

It's not every frame. Yeah.

So it's like grainy and this guy's just like walking around mining his own business. Probably. If I had to guess, probably whistling like a cartoon. And then the ground just disappears and he's gone.

I mean, this could have been in sudden death. This is that's bananas. Yeah. That's all. It's either bad luck or a very expensive assassination attempt on this one man. Yeah. Because there was no one else around. And you know how I feel about like, not everything happens for a reason, but things happen.

Yeah.

And this something happened to this motherfucker. Like he was just like shuffling around and then all of a sudden the earth opened below him.

Yeah. He's like walking in a circle sort of. That's what I was saying.

It almost seems, it seems a lot too conspiracy theory about here, but no. Yeah. You should warn me though, if I'm going to watch a man die on camera.

I will. I will. I wish I could have found more information about this, but I could not. I don't know who he was.

He might have been a fucking demon that like the devil had to bring back. Like, you know what I mean? It was like, who got out? Well, I'll take care of that.

Yeah.

And it was like, keep him, keep him walking. You keep him walking right there.

Son of a bitch. I should have thought to warn you, the night that the Trump near assassination happened, my wife was on her phone. She was like, oh, I guess the somebody who shot the guy who shot Trump, and she turned her phone around, and it was like the uncensored picture of the guy with his face like missing.

Yeah.

I was like, what the fuck?

I got hit with that too, dude. It was like, you know, Twitter's just fucking the wild west again. And yeah, same thing. It was like, well, before the news said anything, I was looking at like a dead kid.

Yeah.

Unlike the fucking Twitter feed. And I'm like, this is gross and terrible.

Yeah.

Because even the blurred version was not leaving much to the imagination.

No, no, it certainly was not.

And it was like hours before anything was really put, not hours, but like well before anything was posted on television in a very sanitized way. This was like, oh jesus, why is this just circulating?

yes. So, so warning, if you click this footage, you do see a guy die.

I mean, it was not anywhere near as bad as the fucking assassination attempt person. Like we saw way worse from that.

Yeah.

I'm just saying that there was a man, and I wasn't expecting the only man on this fucking sidewalk to disappear into the earth. That's all I'm saying. I just wasn't expecting that to be where it happened.

And be dead. Yeah. Yeah. No, fair enough. Fair enough. All right. So we've got two sinks left to go. The sixth Deadly Sink is a little bit more on the manmade side of these disasters, but I'm including it because I'd never heard of it until I started researching sinkholes for this episode. And I think it mostly counts. And it's also one of those that if you try to imagine what this must have been like in the moment, it's crazy. So this is actually brought to us from an article written by Trivia and Jeopardy extraordinaire Ken Jennings, writing for Conde Nast Traveler. And Ken Jennings, who also used to be one of the funniest guys on Twitter, I don't think of like, because he's I think very publicly Mormon. I don't think of Mormons as super funny people, but he's hilarious.

Well, I watch Jeopardy every night when I'm home with my family, and we have never laughed at anything he said.

I don't think he's funny on Jeopardy. I think he's just on Twitter. He's like, he's very witty and clever. Anyway, this article is also not witty and clever, but it is just it's interesting.

Well, I guess you think Ken's listening and you felt that you had to fucking really give and pay him all his compliments. Ken, come on, if you're listening, come on. I mean, you got a real super fan over here.

I got to kiss Ken Jennings' ass just in case. So he was writing for Conde Nast Traveler, and he tells us on November 21st, 1980, Lake Peigneur in Louisiana became the site of one of the most bizarre and spectacular manmade disasters in history. Texaco decided to drill for oil in this relatively shallow lake about 10 feet deep at its deepest, and it had installed a 150-foot high derrick manned by 12 men out in the middle of the lake. Now, I'm not sure how much oil had successfully been drilled at this point. I'm thinking not very much. When they heard a strange series of loud pops and their drill suddenly seized up below the surface of the water. Within minutes, the derrick started to tilt into the water and the dozen men on board fled. According to the article, quote, an hour and a half later, the men watched their $5 million 150-foot high derrick somehow vanish into a lake that had an average depth of less than three feet. And here's why. It seems their drill had accidentally penetrated a main shaft of the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, whose tunnels crisscross the rock under the lake. Now, just an aside to mention, I read elsewhere that this particular salt mine was supported by literal pillars of salt below the ground, which is not the kind of pillar that you want to get sprayed with millions of gallons of water flowing in from the walls.

Yeah.

It's not a combination you want to come into contact with when you are hundreds of feet underground in the salt mines. So back to Ken's writing here, he says, Lake water was now rushing into the mine through the rapidly expanding 14-inch hole in the salt dome with a force 10 times that of a fire hydrant. 50 miners, the ones working in the salt mine, unaware they were being drilled into from above, were racing the rising waters using mine carts and an agonizingly slow elevator to exit the mine eight at a time.

Oh my God. I would be like, I'm the last guy in that shit elevator.

Yeah. You don't even have time to draw straws. That's just a fist fight to who gets on the elevator. But here's the good news. All the miners escaped.

Okay.

So everyone underground got out while the oilmen quote, watched in shock as the water. Now you're on the shore of a lake watching as the water began to circle around its new quote drain, turning the lake into a swirling vortex of mud, trees and barges.

Oh wow.

It became the largest manmade whirlpool in history. 11 barges, a tugboat, a dock, another drilling platform, a parking lot, and a big chunk of nearby Jefferson Island got sucked into the abyss.

Oh my God. This is like a little kid pulling the...

Yeah.

Pulling the fucking tub thing out and all of his toys are like swirling to the drain.

Yeah, except this drain was so strong that the suction reversed the flow of a 12 mile long canal that normally drained the lake into the Gulf of Mexico. And the temporary reversal created a 150 foot waterfall, which is the largest waterfall in Louisiana's history.

Wow. Fucking, you know, the shit that happens looking for oil.

Yeah, truly.

I took my dad to La Brea Tar Pits and I'd been there a bunch of times before, but I never really read any of the signs to like this most recent time. And I was, and it's a fucking environmental disaster, is all it is. I thought it was like where dinosaurs hung out.

No.

And there is dinosaur bones there and stuff, but really it's just like, we fucked this so bad drilling for oil that like we just gave it to the state. Like it's so crazy. And speaking of Texaco, which I don't know if that was Texaco here, but Christopher Lloyd, Doc Brown from Back to the Future, his grandfather started Texaco.

No shit, I didn't know that.

So he would have been fine even if he didn't get the fucking role. But I'm glad he did. He does a great role.

It is.

But I was just thinking about that the whole time you were talking about Texaco gas. It's the only Texaco piece of trivia I know.

Yeah. I don't know if there's any disaster that drilling for oil won't cause on a long enough timeline. They will find a way to fuck it all up.

Yeah, I know. It's so nuts, dude. There will be blood.

Yeah. Well, on top of reversing a 12-mile-long canal and creating a 150-foot-tall waterfall into the center of the earth, when the mine filled with water, the pressure below ground started to build up, and eventually a 400-foot-tall geyser also burst out of the mine shaft.

What?

Yeah.

Okay. Now, speaking of geysers, is all of this gonna happen at Old Faithful? That's a geyser. does that mean it's got like-

Oh, you mean the super volcano?

Oh, I don't know anything about that. You just said that pressure from this formed into a geyser, and I was like, okay, so that maybe there's pressure, and there's water under there because it's spraying water. I'm just feeling like, anywhere there's a geyser, I mean, that's relief, right? That's like-

Yeah.

It's venting something, so. Yeah, I don't know what this super volcano you're talking about is. Maybe we can do an episode about it, though.

Oh, we probably will. The caldera in, is it Yellowstone? There's a volcano that if it were to explode, it would probably end all life on Earth.

Oh, tight, tight, tight, tight.

Yeah, yeah. It's a bad one.

We'll do that. We'll do an episode on that, then.

We'll do an episode on it. It only took a few hours for the 10-foot-deep freshwater lake to transform into a 200-foot-deep saltwater lake. The impact on the area was unsurprisingly pretty massive. The changes in the lake destroyed much of the surrounding ecology and the event effectively ended the local mining industry. Days after the disaster, once the water pressure equalized, nine of the 11 sunken barges popped out of the whirlpool and refloated on the lake surface. Not all was lost. We got a majority of the boats back.

Oh, good. They are buoyant, famously. Although there is someone who I hope we didn't get back as an employee, whoever the guy who was like, this is where we should do it. I've looked at the paperwork and this is where we build the derricks.

Well, so get this. That's just what I was getting to. In the aftermath of the disaster, numerous lawsuits were filed, eventually resulting in Texaco and the salt mine company paying $45 million out to local landowners and businesses. Although it seems low and it doesn't seem like it's the salt company's fault, but whatever. The Mine Safety and Health Administration was unable to officially determine blame because they could not determine whether Texaco was drilling in the wrong place or if the mine's maps were inaccurate. Although Ken Jenning says that the Texaco platform was drilling in the wrong place because of a mapping mistake, and this is the person, Ed, that you were just saying needs to be fired. An engineer mistook transverse Mercator projection coordinates for UTM coordinates.

I mean, that's a simple mistake.

I guess. I don't know what either of those are.

Neither did he. He lied in his fucking resume, dude.

Yeah. He was on LinkedIn just firing out resumes like, yeah, I took a semester of geology.

I took. I minored in drills, bro. Did you do anything in map making though? No, actually I didn't. I have no cartographer experience, no drafting experience. I lied on my resume when it's lunch.

He thinks transverse Mercator projections is the name of a tool album. Yeah, so that takes us to the 7th Deadly Sink, which is sort of another tale of industrial hubris and long lasting consequences. Although this one is Soviet. We got to beat up on the Russians a little bit. Welcome to Brezhnevki, Russia, home to one of the world's largest sinkholes affectionately. I don't know why affectionately, but affectionately nicknamed the Grandfather. So, Brezhnevki is a city of more than 150,000 people, and it was built directly on top of a potash mine. Again, I didn't know what potash was. I thought it was maybe like a special vodka potato or something. But it is salt that contains potassium and is used as a fertilizer. It's big business and Brezhnevki produces around 10% of the world's supply, or it did. The mines are the city's biggest employer, so the city is physically and economically built on potash. After nearly a century of extraction, deep voids were left underneath Brezhnevki. And much like the salt mine in Louisiana, the ceilings of these massive underground caverns were supported only by pillars of soluble salt, which someone should have seen this coming. In 2006, a freshwater spring began flowing into the mine about somewhere, the numbers again were a little fuzzy on this, somewhere between 720 or 1500 feet below the surface. So big difference there, but...

Yeah, well, they probably hired that guy who did the fucking other map.

I know, he looked at the wrong coordinates. The freshwater spring dissolved the saltwater pillars and the grandfather was born. And grandfather isn't just big, he's hungry.

Oh shit.

Like I said, we're always calling these things hungry, consuming, eating. Since the grandfather's appearance, it's been steadily consuming the entire town of Bergeniki, which is what I said at the beginning. I was pretty sure this could happen and it can and it has. We're talking entire blocks of apartments, schools, businesses. In 2007, it swallowed the city's main rail line. In 2011, it ate a highway. It's like Godzilla if he were a hole, a slowly attack of the giant hole, which sounds like a porn parody Kaiju movie.

I hope it never comes out.

I do think there is a potent monster movie metaphor here about the manifestation of greed and endless search for production and growth, unleashing a force that devours the very town and lives it was promised to support, but I'll leave that to the Russians to make.

yes.

To date, the Grandfather is 780 feet deep and 1020 feet wide. Nine more sinkholes have sprung up in and around the town. And in 2008, the Russian government finally decided enough was enough and began relocating residents, but lots of people don't want to leave. This one local, Oleg Pashkov, gave an interview to the news outlet Medusa, and Oleg says, the whole city lives close to the sinkholes. If the new one comes right at my door, then I will be really scared. Not now though, the closest sinkhole is 400 meters away.

That doesn't seem far enough.

Which does not seem far enough for me.

No way, dude.

But you know what? They're built different over there.

They sure are, yeah, they sure are.

Federal officials and company executives are debating whether to relocate the entire city to the opposite bank of the Kama River where the bedrock is solid. But engineers have assured them that the era of sinkhole formation is over and no new holes will open as much of the mine is now flooded.

Oh, that sounds, that's not an assurance that I could.

Yeah, as we all know, when the Russian government tells you it's fine, it's historically totally fine.

Yep, totally.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Nothing to sink here.

Nothing to sink here. So, that's the seven deadly sinks, but we're not done yet. This situation with the grandfather and people not wanting to leave town reminded me of one of my other favorite sinkhole stories, and it comes from my favorite place on earth, Pennsylvania.

Of course it does.

I think we've talked about Centralia.

No, we never, if we mentioned Centralia, it was in passing because we never released our full Centralia audio. So, if you guys like Centralia, we have more in our lives.

Yeah, I visited Centralia last fall because we were going to do a whole episode on it and I have a bunch of pictures.

Which is to say a W-H-O-L-E episode, not a whole episode on it. This is the only whole episode we're doing.

Correct, an entire.

yes, an entire episode.

Someday, we'll do Centralia someday. And you'll probably hear this story again in our Centralia episode. But the point is that this town is famous for the Mayan fire burning beneath it that will keep burning for hundreds of years. It was the inspiration for Silent Hill, with the smoke in the air. But Centralia's most terrifying story is actually sinkhole related. I mean, still mine fire related, but a sinkhole is involved. On Valentine's Day, 1981, a group of Pennsylvania state politicians came to town to meet with Centralia borough officials to figure out what to do about the fire that had been burning below ground for about 20 years at this point. Since 1969, residents had been suffering from headaches and nausea caused by the smoke and the gas leaking from below ground. And all of the various plans enacted to keep the fire contained by digging underground trenches were clearly failing. And so anyway, these politicians showed up and in small towns, word travels fast. And this woman, Florence Domboski, sent her son, Todd, on a mission to determine why these strangers in suits had shown up in town. Along the way, Todd noticed thin wisps of smoke coming from a grassy area near a tree, which of course, peaked his curiosity as it would any young kid. And he walked over to check it out. As he walked over to check out the smoke coming from beneath the tree, the earth dropped from beneath him and dragged him up to his knees in a muddy smoky pit. Sort of like quicksand, as he struggled to pull himself out, the ground dropped further and his problem became much more treacherous. gases from the mine fire poured out and Todd began to scream for help. And all the while, he was still sinking until his head was several feet below the surface. And I don't think several feet below the surface as in completely covered, but just as in, he was sliding several feet below the surface and you couldn't see him.

Yeah, like he could still see out probably, but he's, you know, sinking.

Yeah, as he sank, Todd managed to grasp on to an exposed root from the nearby tree.

Thank you, Root. Thank you. Thank you, life-saving Root.

yes, he continued to yell for help and held on for his life. And in less than a minute, his cousin with the badass name, Eric Wolfgang, appeared on the scene and was able to pull Todd to safety. Todd was quoted in the paper at the time as saying, The ground just started dropping. I went down to my knees, then my waist, and I just kept going down. I grabbed on to some roots and was screaming for Eric. I couldn't see him, and there was smoke everywhere. I heard him screaming for me to put my hand up, then he grabbed me. It was real hot, and it stank, and it sounded as though the wind was howling down there.

Oh, wow.

So he was like, I was in hell.

He was in hell.

I mean, Centralia is hell, basically, right? It's like in terms of if you just had to paint a picture of hell, of like fire beneath the ground. But it also, it does seem like every sinkhole story, you could just be like, it's a doorway to hell. these are all doorways to hell.

Yeah. Although this is the only one that I think actually came with fire and brimstone out of most of these. Because this wasn't a traditional sinkhole. This wasn't formed by groundwater eating through limestone or whatever.

This was formed by sin.

This was formed by a town full of sinners who were finally being punished. Todd emerged from the hole covered in warm mud but was otherwise okay. Later analysis would show the hole was expelling deadly quantities of carbon monoxide. If Todd had remained there for only a few more minutes, he likely would have asphyxiated.

Oh, wow.

Old mine maps also showed that a shaft had once existed at that location, and though it had been filled in, the mine fire gases heaten and loosen the material, causing it to give way and open up into this near deadly sinkhole. So, the near death of Todd Dombosky was sort of a big turning point for the history of Centralia.

Started installing fences.

Well, the politicians who were there that day quickly found out that this kid fell into hell.

And promptly went to work trying to find a way to profit off of it.

Yeah. No, they, well, unfortunately, for the residents of Centralia, they were just all forcefully told to leave. And eventually their zip code was revoked.

It was changed to 666.

Yeah, 666. All the addresses are now 666 Centralia Ave.

Yep.

But yeah, the town was evacuated. And much like the Russian town, a lot of people didn't want to leave. And I think, I mean, when I was up there, there were still two homes standing. And I believe that they are both occupied. I think the deal that got struck was that like residents of a certain age were allowed, if they so chose, were allowed to live out the rest of their lives on their property in their homes. So I think there's a handful of like very old people still hanging on. But once they're gone, I believe Centralia will truly be no more. Yeah. Well, unfortunately for Todd, the incident would not go quietly from his mind. It left a deep scar on his psyche. And according to a Facebook post embedded in one of the articles I read on the sinkhole, Todd died in 2022 at the age of 53. He struggled with drug addiction as an adult, one of the victims apparently of the Mount Carmel opioid doctor, who I'll look into for a future episode or something, because that sounds like a story there. But Todd had also long suffered nightmares about his near death. And in his dream, he would be riding his bicycle along a Centralia sidewalk, and it would open up and swallow him.

Oh, yeah. The PTSD you must have from just at any moment, the ground can eat you. Yeah. And do you have like physical muscle memory evidence of that? I can only imagine.

I think about that sometimes, not just for people who survive sinkholes, but explosion, whether it's an explosion from a bomb or just from a gas accident or something, like people who survive sudden terrifying things, the PTSD must be crazy.

And you let me get in the rental car today. Didn't even ask if I'll be fine.

Well, no, Ed, you're stronger. You're stronger than most.

That's true. I am. That's true. Not physically, but I am mentally strong.

But also, I mean, even that you were in a car on the highway, like as opposed to someone who just was walking down the street, you know, or in bed, like that's got to be a whole other level.

yes. It's a place. It's like when you get in a car, you're basically agreeing to the fact that anything can happen in the world of fast moving automobiles. Yeah. You're not agreeing to fall into the ground. So, yeah, you're right.

But still, either way, I mean, it's a scary world out there, man. That's why we do this show. Because I think if you are a person like Ed and I, who even though sinkholes weren't really on our radar, they are now, and you walk around with this stuff in your head and you got to find a way to blow off a little bit of steam and laugh at it sometimes because otherwise, I mean, you're going to fall into a sinkhole-driven opioid addiction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess with that, Ed, how are we feeling about the fear tier for this one where I know we both came into this with sinkholes not even on our radar, not on the fear tier at all, but I think they may have risen a little bit after all this.

Yeah, I put them at like a six or seven. I think it's like above, maybe it's around the middle, maybe a little bit above because there's, you know, I go to Florida sometimes.

For what? Why do you go to Florida for?

Yeah, my friends' kids compete in like a national rowing competition in Sarasota.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. And so as long as these kids keep making it to the championships or to the tournament or whatever, then we'll keep going. And also there's seven area Hooters locations there, which, as you know, I feel like we're missing that in Connecticut and California. So pretty cool.

And the waitresses all love you. I'm sure.

No, it's not about that. It just cracks me up that it's going so, so well there. Like it's when you're in the Sarasota airport, it's advertised as the actual language, seven area locations.

Yeah.

I mean, I was like, let's fucking go. Good job. Good job having such a stronghold. But that said, if I'm going there to eat some sort of John Daily themed menu item at Hooters, I'm within 400 meters of a sinkhole, potentially.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess I feel like if you're living in a state with that many sinkholes, you got to have some place to go blow off steam.

Yeah.

I get a couple of pitchers.

doesn't look like any Hooters have ever fallen into a sinkhole.

That's why you go there, dude. They're fucking the only safe place.

Well, as of this summer, they fell into a financial sinkhole.

Well, yeah. I mean, that's going to... You're going to run into that. No one could survive COVID and then maintain profits necessary post it.

Yeah, they closed dozens of locations this year.

Not in Sarasota.

west Palm Beach.

Oh my God. RIP, God bless.

RIP, God bless Hooters. What are we talking about? Oh, we were talking about where are the fear tier sinkholes fall? And you were saying like a six or a seven or a five or a six?

Yeah, I would say a six or a seven. Yeah, because it could happen. And as a person who is pretty readily followed by sudden death, it's one more tool in the sudden death arsenal.

Yeah, it's one more trick in death's playbook.

Yeah, sudden death. Or also over 48 minutes low death. So it's, who knows?

Yeah, yeah, you know. I would put mine about the same place. It's a very realistic, very possible, very scary and sudden way to go. I guess in a sense, it kind of pairs well with the first episode of the season because it is a sudden way to go that we didn't really talk about on that episode. But yeah, I guess I'd put it at a six or a seven. I just hope that the ground beneath my feet remains strong and uneaten by rainwater.

Yeah, that's all you can do. You can just hope that the world is not eroded enough around you. You don't want Swiss cheese under there. I think six or seven, we're good. Learned about them. sinkholes are interesting. If they happen out in the woods, they can create these unbelievable biodome level like extraordinary ecosystems. If they're caused by oil barons, it's bad for everyone. And if it's like just in the city, if it's a pipe feature, we're fucked. So yeah, I think, you know, I'm pro sinkholes in the woods or like the forests or mountains. I'm anti sinkholes where we hang out.

Agreed. Agreed. And we can agree on that. And I think that's a great place to wrap up this episode. So I hope you've enjoyed learning about sinkholes with us or are now extra terrified of them now that you know that they can eat everything up to and including entire lakes, neighborhoods, tapoos and God knows what else. But I'm sure next week, we'll be back with a topic even more terrifying than this.

All the Hooters have closed.

Episode 33, season four, hooter-less. But until next time, this has been Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And we will see you next week. Bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is tess Fiefel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is BLEEP BLEEP.

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Good night.

We are in this together.

Together. Together.

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