Agatha Was A Real Bitch
Man oh Manischewitz, this looks like something out of a cheap horror flick
Emergency workers in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are struggling to get aid to communities cut off by Tropical Storm Agatha.
The storm has left at least 150 people dead since Saturday, most of them in Guatemala.
The picture is of a sinkhole that opened up in Guatemala City
The 30m-diameter sinkhole opened up in a northern district of Guatemala City, with residents blaming the rains and substandard drainage systems. Local reports said one man was killed when the building was swallowed. In 2007, three people died when a similar sinkhole appeared in the same area.
I can’t imagine how awful it must have been to have been in that building…
Big Blows, Gorebal Warming | Mr. Bingley | 
June 1, 2010 7:13 am
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Holy….that’s a REAL photo? Scary.
Ain’t it just INSANE?
It looks completely fake.
I keep expecting Them to crawl out of it…
I smell a fake.
I’m with Skyler. I’m raising the BS flag. Doesn’t that look a little too symmetrical?
Jeez, Bingley. It’s COMPLETELY the Millenium Falcon’s wormhole.
And it also seems it’s legit and has happened before.
Still not buying it.
This appears unusually large, but it’s possible, in some terrain. The shape could come from the water moving in a circular fashion, similar to water draining from a sink.
IIRC, a lot of Central America is composed of Karst topography which is especially vulnerable to erosion.
Yeah, I *thought* this was familiar! These sinkholes are quite common in Central America, such as in the Yucatan. They’re known as “cenotes”.
Y’know, there was a reason those central-american indians formed a whole religion around caves.
They had LOTS of them.
Look up “Conchoidal fracture” sometime.
Sink holes end up that way. In Mexico/Yucatan they call them “cenotes”
Looks like a deep one, though. Cave down there?
They had LOTS of them.
And those were their only reliable water source. There are few to no rivers in that region.
Which is why you don’t drink the water in the Yucatan.
There are rivers, they’re just under the limestone. That’s where the caves come from.
yes. that hole looks amazingly scary. when i first witnessed the picture, it left me in complete disbelief.
how does a hole that size even happen?
Yeah, it’s Associated (with terrorists) Press, but in this sad sad world, you takes whats you can gets.
don, from what i have read it’s a combination of the geology under the city (lots of limestone which dissolves relatively easily in certain type of water) and old poorly constructed and thus leaky leaky leaky sewer systems which allow lots of aforementioned water to, well, eat away lots of the limestone. Crazy scary, thinking something like that could be underneath you.
Okay, there is a Karst preserve not a quarter mile from my house. Should I be scared?