DEL.ICIO.USNew York Times News Service
Published on: 05/09/08
DAISETTA, Texas — A huge and ravenous sinkhole that threatened to swallow this little East Texas oil town gobbled more crumbling earth Thursday but spared, at least for now, homes, the high school and the main road, Farm to Market 770.
"It's unreal — the earth just wallered up," said Lynn Wells, the mayor and fire chief, who monitored emergency efforts, speeding back and forth on his red Harley-Davidson.
 New York Times | ||
| An aerial view of the sinkhole in east Texas that is threatening the small town of Daisetta. | ||
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Since the rim of an underground salt dome collapsed and the ground cracked and gave way abruptly on Wednesday morning, the hole — already one of the largest on record, geologists here said — has grown to about 600 feet by 525 feet and almost 150 feet deep, according to Cpl. Hugh Bishop of the Liberty County Sheriff's Office.
Tom Branch, coordinator of the Liberty County Office of Emergency Management, has been in the job only two weeks and was expecting something different from oil country. "I'm used to things blowing up, not falling in," Branch said.
Two trucks have already tumbled into the saltwater muck, along with two grain tanks, utility poles and pine trees. A work shed of the DeLoach Oil and Gas Well Vacuum Service adjacent to the pit hung precariously over the rim, likely to topple in next.
"I've got some lakefront lots to sell here," joked a neighbor, Harold McCann, 82, as he sat on his property staring out at what had been, barely 24 hours ago, a wooded field.
But officials expressed cautious optimism Thursday that the collapse had stabilized. "It appears to be slowing down, the hole does," said Bishop, the Liberty County deputy.
But Bishop said that "there are still chunks falling in" and that authorities were prepared to evacuate Daisetta's 1,034 residents if the hole suddenly grew.
Carl E. Norman, a consulting geologist and professor emeritus at the University of Houston, did not offer residents much comfort when he said at a news briefing here, "This is not the largest sinkhole in the world." But Dr. Norman added: "For a salt dome, this is a very large one. This is exceptionally large."
He said, "This may become stable any day, or it could collapse in six months." And, he warned, "it could double in size."
There were not many options, Dr. Norman said, adding, "Stopping it is a very difficult thing to do."
The entire subterranean salt dome might be as much as six miles in diameter, he said.
The event, he said, might have been entirely natural or hastened by injections of saltwater wastes by oil companies.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, sinkholes are common where the underlining rock is limestone, carbonate or salt beds that can be dissolved by circulating water that hollows out caverns. The land above stays intact for a while, then can suddenly collapse.
In 1973, a sinkhole known as "the December Giant," which was 520 by 125 feet across and 60 feet deep, opened up near Montevallo, Ala., in what was then called the largest collapse in the country in many years. In the 1980s, smaller sinkholes opened up in and around Daisetta, about 70 miles northeast of Houston and named for two early residents, Daisy Barrett and Etta White.
But nothing like "the Sinkhole de Mayo" — as it has been called — has ever happened here, residents said.
The first warnings came Wednesday morning when employees of the DeLoach company saw cracks in the earth and the roadway started "warping down," Corporal Bishop said.
Ricky and Dicky Johnson, brothers who live near McCann close to the pit, said they felt it coming on about 10 a.m. "The ground got to shaking," said Dicky Johnson, over the din of news helicopters hovering over the site.
Quickly, the hole grew to 20 feet across. Then things started falling in.
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