Huge sinkhole in Surrey street

winterwhite

I thought sink holes were ancient chalk mines. One appeared near our house in Kent when I was a child. This was on the North Downs. There was a television programme about them recently. Quite colossal and very deep. Abandoned when finished with and gradually filled in over the centuries.
Maybe the Godalming hole isn't a sink hole but of more modern origin.

Sink holes can have a variety of causes. Read all about it here:
www.bgs.ac.uk/geology-projects/sinkholes-research/what-causes-sinkholes-where-uk/

Scary- where will it end? Poor people.

Fortunately family in several parts of Surrey no-where near.

It is Godstone not Godalming and the North Downs chalkpits are very close.

Coal mines in South Wales

I thought sink holes were ancient chalk mines. One appeared near our house in Kent when I was a child. This was on the North Downs. There was a television programme about them recently. Quite colossal and very deep. Abandoned when finished with and gradually filled in over the centuries.
Maybe the Godalming hole isn't a sink hole but of more modern origin.

This is interesting, especially the planned evacuation to the Godstone caves in wartime.
godstone.net/aboutus/history/mines/

It used to be a sand quarry.

Absolutely nothing to do with fracking but it is quite common in areas where the geology is a mix of sand and clay.

We lived in south east Berkshire for many years and settlement and movement and houses needing underpinning was a common occurence. Several of our friends had their houses underpinned when after exceptionally dry, or exceptionally wet weather the clay lenses either shrunk excessively of expanded excessively.

In our last house our neighbour had a problem when a hole opened out under one corner of their house. In their case a drain had shattered and all the water leaking out of it had excavated a huge hole, The drain was repaired and the hole back filled.

I understand that this hole may have been caused by a split watermain. An inconvenience, but not a disaster.

On my bus route to school! DH reminded me that we looked at a house there, for £9,000. Might not have been a good investment....

Mother nature does like to protest and pull the ground out from under our feet

Same happened in South Wales last year, a built up area of
terraced houses. The sinkhole happened in a modern house cul de sac

Thats a big pothole!

Also the 3 little pigs and the big bad Wolf?

Doesn’t the Bible have something to say about the foolishness of building a house on sand?