Sink holes

There are enormous caves, largely inaccessible, not far from here and many buildings and roads built on the surface above them.

Hull Pot near Pen y Ghent is an old sink hole.

The sink holes are largely in limestone or chalk areas (same stuff really) and the nature of chalk and limestone is that it gets dissolved away by rainwater which is essentially carbonic acid. The CO2 dissolves into the rain as it falls.
There is not a lot you can do about it other than to move to somewhere where you are insoluble soluble rock. Around where I live your house is more likely to sink down an old uncharted mine shaft or into salt workings.
There is a lot of sand where I am and one road round the corner has a row of springs which washes away the sands and keeps causing big holes in the road. I do wonder how it stands as an insurance risk.

Cue for a Sunday school chorus about "wise men building their house upon a rock ."

Do they happen in open country? Maybe the roads are being laid badly! It seems water gets under the road surface and then washes away the ground underneath.
Another cost cutting exercise to increase profits by the contractors #cynical... Moi?

OMG,what a dreadful thing to have happened, you'd never even begin to learn to live with a tragedy of that magnitude.
Perhaps some of these sink holes are old mineworkings that have been filled in years ago and have been undermined by years of rain and traffic vibration. I can't imagine how these poor folk are feeling, a complete feeling of helplessness I should think.

There may have been some sort of mining work or 'diggings' there in the past. we don't tend to think about what's under our feet do we?
I read of one of these in the U.S. A family member was in bed, it happened overnight and when the bedroom door was opened by the Mother in the morning,there was no floor, no furniture no teenage son.He was never found it was too deep and too dangerous and the house was just left empty.
Imagine that.

That's a reason for increased flooding, I don't recall seeing anyone argue that it causes sinkholes. I would have thought that it mitigates the problem by preventing water soaking in.

I'm sure I read somewhere that one of the reasons is because there are more paved driveways and paved front 'gardens' rather than soil which helps to soak up the water.

Make you think about those sinkholes waiting to happen........

Last August there was what appeared to be an ordinary pothole on the corner of Leeds St. and King Edward St. in Liverpool, but when I looked closer there was just a great big empty void inside......

I agree, it's really frightening. There were a number of sinkholes reported in that terrible winter of 2013/14 when the country seemed to be disappearing under water.

I found an interesting article online - sorry, I don't like links either but it was too much to copy and paste into the thread. You can skip past it if you like

news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130812-florida-sinkhole-disney-world-explainer-urban-science/

I don't know why they are suddenly in the news. Have they always happened and not been reported, or is this increasing?

Very scary I agree. Just a few metres either way and one of those houses would have disappeared into it