Expert: Guatemalan disaster not a sinkhole

[Judi Lynn]

Expert: Guatemalan disaster not a sinkhole
by Staff Writers
Guatemala City (UPI) Jun 3, 2010

A Guatemalan geologist said the massive hole that opened up beneath Guatemala City's downtown is not a sinkhole but instead a "piping feature."
Geologist Sam Bonis said a sinkhole is defined as an area where bedrock has been eaten away by groundwater and the 100-foot deep, 66-foot wide hole that opened up during the weekend in the capital does not qualify, Discovery News reported.

He said the hole is instead a "piping feature" resulting from the pumice fill, ash flows from ancient volcanic eruptions, beneath the city. Bonis said the ash is 600 feet thick in some places.

Bonis said he and other experts were called in when a similar hole opened up just a few blocks away from the current site in 2007.

More:
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Expert_Guatemalan_disaster_not_a_sinkhole_999.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Thanks for the info! It still raises a lot of questions, though, which I imagine

people far more qualified than I am are puzzling over as well. Why is the hole so "clean" (so "clean" that it looks unreal)--straight down, with sheered sides, as if sliced with a knife? You'd expect a collapse involving soft material like ash would be ragged. What stopped the surrounding buildings and streets from collapsing into the hole creating a more meteor-like "splash" look?

I'm also wondering about the volcanic activity in the region. Has that spot been shaken recently? The article mentions hurricanes (floods impacting the runoff systems, water accumulating below the surface). I don't quite understand how that would create a sheered hole like this. I'd expect a big messy muddy scene with uneven collapses--buckling streets, some houses slipping off their foundations and/or cracking, mud oozing up in some places and "sinking" in others, etc., from too much water under the surface. This sheered hole seems to need to sudden shake to create it (not a more gradual filling with too much water), or a combination of soggy subsurface ash from big rains AND a sudden shake or slippage of nearby fault lines.

I'm aware from living in California that there are slushy places underground and rocky places underground and you don't want to build houses on the slushy parts because those are the places where an earthquake "rolls" the ground, toppling houses and other buildings. When they build skyscrapers these days, in CA, they build in "rollers" to allow the skyscraper to sway in an earthquake. Otherwise there would be vast areas where nothing but thatched huts could be safely built. Also, a wood house is safer in an earthquake because wood is flexible (kind of like wood ships at sea, which creak and moan, and actually open up in rough weather, relieving the pressures on the overall structure). And "landfill" is bad--as to earthquakes--because it replicates the conditions of underground slush that are so bad in earthquakes. There are a lot of problems with "landfill" developments (pollution, for instance) but in CA their instability is a major problem. Geologists/engineers (and planning departments) can determine what the underground structure is like, and thus how the above-ground, man-made structures should be built to withstand earthquakes. Corruption, of course, is a problem, and MONEY is often the key to whether or not buildings are earthquake safe (or hurricane safe, or fire safe). And I imagine that this is a huge problem in a poor country like Guatemala, where--as in so many Latin American countries--peasant farmers have been driven from their lands, to benefit large corporations and the super-rich, and migrate to urban areas where there is not enough housing--so housing on the cheap is the rule--and where the poor have been continually looted and oppressed (hundreds of thousands of Mayan villagers outright slaughtered in Guatemala, for instance, during the Reagan reign of terror), and the country's resources and economy ravaged, so that there is NO MONEY for infrastructure, for public works, for safe housing--no money for geologists and engineers, no money for the common good.

We are heading in that direction, too. Look what corporations are doing to US--utterly destroying Gulf coast economies, and, indeed, killing people--as well as entire ecologies--with their cheap, vastly greedy attitude toward safety. We are joining the "third world" in the ravaging of our educational, environmental and safety systems. In CA, this Enron-cover-up governor--the "Terminator"--has proposed killing child health programs and in-house care for the elderly poor, in addition to devastating the educational system (after advertising himself as the "education governor"--God, what utter rot these corpo pols speak!). What ELSE will be gone before this Great Looting is over? We are suffering a Great Sinkhole, too--the Great Sinkhole into which trillions of dollars have disappeared, to make the rich vastly richer and lard the war profiteers.

[Judi Lynn]

2. I am overwhelmed with confusion about the straight drop, and the actual circle of that hole, myself.

It truly doesn't seem possible.

They can forget about infrastructure, apparently, as the U.S. has been bleeding that country dry, like covert vampires, since the Eisenhower government assisted United Fruit in overthrowing their President Jacobo Arbenz who was bent upon raising the standard of living for the poor, instead of the owners of the banana plantations, and the United Fruit corporation which also controlled almost everything in the country.

Amen to your heartfelt, thoughtful, accurate comments.