I live IN this area, and I just came from the Strawberry Festival. I want the farmers to do well,because they are about the only thing keeping more wal marts and other sprawl here, but something needs to be done about this billion gallon pump they did.

Of course they are an important part of the economy, but all our livelihoods depend on the aquifer.

Everyone has rights, but homeowners' rights are being trampled in this case.

should not be eating fresh strawberries in Winter! I don't know about what's sold on the local market, but the Florida berries that get shipped here tend to be tasteless and hard, anyways. Good strawberries are a delicate fruit with a shelf life of maybe three or four days. My family gorges on fresh strawberries in the month of June when the local berries are in. They won't even look at them the rest of the year!

We loose so they can profit. God bless the USA and free market enterprise. pffft

& subsidence and hurricanes. It is now the Baytown Nature Center.

http://www.ourbaytown.com/Around_Baytown1/target42.html

video from 1985 before all the houses were cleared:

My maternal grandparents lived near there.

you can tell these were once beautiful well cared for homes. What happened to the owners. I think i saw a boat in front of one of the houses. Did the owners have to flee suddenly?

the subdivision in 1983, after Alicia. The area always flooded. Even now that is a nature reserve, it still had about 10-15 feet of floodwaters during/after Hurricane Ike in 2008.

lotsa transplants have built on poor land in Texas -- the ground in ETX is called "gumbo".

I've been wondering about these sinkholes. This is a little scary. I never thought for a minute that this could be a reason.

that MSM hasn't gotten to...and I hope your post will ask others to "QUESTION MORE."

Sure sounds like something going on there that needs more investigation.

It's been such a non-issue, almost a coverup.

the courses usually have their own wells and pump millions of gallons of water from underground, pump thousands of gallons of pesticides on the grass, and cause sinkholes and pollution. Pinellas County is a peninsula surround by water and barely above sea level. It's the most dense county in Florida. The home owners here get sucked into the sink holes with no insurance that will cover you most of time.

...worst, most idiotic uses of good, arable land in human history. It's not just the land misuse and the waste of fresh water, but the noxious chemicals and C02 emissions necessary to keep such wide swaths looking like a well manicured ex-burb, front lawn. All so a bunch of old, fat white guys can knock a small white ball everywhere but where they want it to go. 2,000 years from now, it will be one of the hallmarks of consumer age, human stupidity.

They will not do anything about this until an entire Walmart disappears in a sink hole, oh wait, walmarts are economic sink holes.

a NASCAR track.

I have wondered what the hell caused these sinkholes. I had figured it was just people building subdivisions in areas that were never suitable for buildings. But this is worse than that. This is preventable. When I saw this recent disaster, I realized that these houses are older and the neighborhoods established....this was not an area that was just recently populated.

I cannot believe that there is no one responsible when they pull water or allowed to pull water at those rates. So the homeowners are just screwed. Incredible. I am going to shoot out some letters to some MSM news and ask why this is not being reported.

which was referenced in Ken Burn's documentary Dust Bowl. Remember?

Corporate farming is not a good thing. The greed and disregard for consequences is astounding. What a world

edit to add: What are people going to drink if corporate farmers dry up all our aquifers? Blows my mind.

another man-made problem that we are not hearing anything about. Crickets.

We have pushed the envelope and we (as mankind) will pay the consequences one day. I don't know the answer....we have gotten used to all the food grown this way. I don't know what people will drink in the future.....I suppose that the world should save up their money for desalination plants. Water will be the next gold. We have fracking up here in PA, using water in astronomical amounts too.

"I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure." ~Agent Smith from The Matrix

DU is a progressive board, but don't dare mention that humanity needs to keep our numbers in check, that the number of children people have should be limited. You would not believe the number of people who think that we have no right to tell people how many children they can have. You will be accused of supporting eugenics.

If we're not willing to address these issues as a species, then we are in for a major smack down. Personally, I think we're beyond the point of no return & that smack down is coming no matter what we do. We cannot live outside of nature. We've raped, plundered & polluted our nest. Our planet can't support 7 billion people living the American dream. Our arrogance is about to catch up with us.

I think of all the humans that have ever lived in the history of Earth & I realize that I am truly in the 1% - one of the most fortunate of all humans to ever have lived. It's humbling.

....Fact is, the planet cannot support the % of homo sapiens living the consumer lifestyle we have now, much less another 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians.

Reminds me of the movie Independence Day. I doubt the makers had this in mind when they produced that mindless piece of entertainment, but WE are no better than the "aliens." WE are doing the same damn thing to our home planet. WE would do the same to other worlds as well, but fortunately for the galaxy we currently cannot get off this rock, except in very small numbers and even then, we can't travel terribly far.

I also agree that we will be one of the losers in the great, Anthropocene extinction, when the last two humans kill each other, fighting over the last barrel of oil. The jury is still out on whether human "intelligence" is a viable, evolutionary survival strategy, but so far it doesn't look good.

And the lines written for the charicter he was playing, that's bologna. Animal populations go through major boom and bust cycles, repuglarly. Animals will eat as much and expand their population as much as the resources/predation permit. As do plants.

Humans just have found ways to stave off the population crash end of things, while increasing lifespan and basically eliminating predation. For the time being, anyhow. Just means any die off will likely be that much more dramatic assuming that eventually we completely run out our resources.

Completely drained and no longer holds water.

Bottled water from Walmart.

Next stop - how to poison the free air around us and sell us some corporate "pure-air". To overuse the meme --- Oh, wait.

years ago, I was visiting friends near clearwater. one day, as I was driving down to tampa, we were detoured because of a large sinkhole that suddenly appeared in the southbound lanes of US 19. made for some very interesting driving.

than this, & continually growing) sinkhole in florida -- linked to business activity (van't remember which) -- & then i dug into the players & found a prominent family...

Big prominent families connected with all types which use water to keep plants from freezing. They answer to no one, especially homeowners.

find the article again.

the information on families i got by looking into the company named.

A nearly 400-foot deep sinkhole in Louisiana has swallowed all of the trees in its area and enacted a mandatory evacuation order for about 150 residences for fear of potential radiation and explosions.



The gaping hole has a diameter of 372 feet. It is in Assumption Parish, La., about 50 miles south of Baton Rouge. The sinkhole sits in the middle of a heavily wooded space where it has consumed all of the soaring cypress trees that had been there. Flyover photos show some of the treetops still visible through the mud.

Authorities enacted a mandatory evacuation for between 100 and 150 homes in the area, but most people have chosen to stay, according to the Mayor's Office of Emergency Preparedness. If any of the dangers seem to become more imminent, the order will be escalated to a forced evacuation. While officials are not certain what caused the massive sinkhole, they believe it may be have ben caused by a nearby salt cavern owned by the Texas Brine Company.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/mysterious-louisiana-sinkhole-raises-concerns-explosions-radiation/story?id=16978072

Texas Brine Company, LLC is the largest independent brine producer in the United States.
Brine is water, fully saturated with sodium chloride - common table salt - and is the sole raw material used in the manufacture of chlorine and caustic soda (chloralkali). The production of brine in industrial quantities to meet the needs of U.S. industries requires a substantial investment of capital and expertise, and Texas Brine is a leader in this field.

Texas Brine is a family-owned business based in Houston, with a proud heritage in salt-related businesses since 1926. Texas Brine pioneered the commercial production of brine through solution mining in Texas salt domes, developing its first well in 1946...

http://www.texasbrine.com/company.html


Texas Brine is owned by a family that also own United Salt, a major salt producer, also Houston-based, and both are subsidiaries of the holding co. "Texas United". They all have the same personnel:

AC360.

This is John Zarrella:


He point blank laid it out, that most of those sink holes in FL are caused by farming taking all that water out of the ground. To bad others fall far short of what the public needs/should know.

I always like John Zarella's reporting. He tells things like they are when given the opportunity.

And we have not heard much. The guy that lost his home was almost too emotional to speak when we talked to him. It was like his world was falling apart.

There are just no words to explain how visible the pain was for him. I'm not overly religious but I prayed for him last night and will continue to for a while. I don't know how he will make it through this but there is nothing anyone can do for his pain except pray. sigh

sinkholes here in west Texas, like the Wink sink, home of Roy Orbison:



The "Wink Sink' sinkhole formed almost overnight. It is located near Wink and Kermit, Texas.

Yes, that is a large drilling rig in the picture as well.

He was really surprised. That's huge. And deep.

The entire displaced volume underground was a huge salt bed. A nearby oil well operated with zero problems, pumped out all the oil, then capped the hole.

But rainwater seeped into the capped borehole, and essentially washed away the salt in solution over a few years. When enough was gone, the surface collapsed.

I doubt solar panels or wind farms would cause the same kind of destruction.

But everyone knows I'm just one step away from being a Communist or terrorist or something...

Communist, whatever you want to call me. And I am proud of it!

You know ...one hand feeding the other. How long will it be before the people rise up against the corporations who profit from greed and destruction?

driving home from work, and I wondered HOW did this happen? What caused this? But not a word.

that require homeowners to buy sinkhole insurance separate from their regular policies the way we do hurricane or flood insurance.
But the kicker is that unlike hurricane or flood insurance, the insurance companies don't actually have to offer you a sinkhole policy if you ask for one.

Which we did. Turns out the cost of the survey was split $25 each with them, and the coverage only added a hundred dollars a year.

State Farm dropped us like a hot potato when we made the move from WPB to Tampa. Our new insurance, which I'm grateful is not yet Citizens would not even consider sinkhole based on our zip code.

I did not know they were doing that. West Palm is close to the water also, I would have thought just as close as Tampa?

So sorry about that.

OUT OF THE LOOP!

Man for global warming. The evidence is overwhelming but not completely conclusive so those with a special interest will deny the causal relationship so what we are seeing is exactly what would be expected.

What is needed here is a limit on the number of wells permitted and to meter the wells in use with shut-off valves when a pre-determined limit has been hit.

when their state is not protecting them from such lack of accountability.

.

That's the madfloridian-stream media. Thanks for posting this.

That was funny and nice.

the state's strata, why on earth would this practice be allowed? Seems like pure madness.

This is one of them.

Agricultural and farming interests are granted permits to pump ridiculous amounts of groundwater up onto their over fertilized fields whereupon nearby springs such as Silver, Weiki, Rainbow, etc. eventually start pumping out this now phosphate laden H2O thus turning these once pristine, crystal clear springs into algae swamps. Flow rates of these first magnitude, world-class treasures are decreasing every year too.

Yeah, there's been a drought here like many other places in the US, (huh, wonder why?) but when you've seen entire lakes disappear into a crack in the ground over the past few years leaving people's once lakeside docks now high and dry, ya really gotta wonder how much more of a visual is needed for educational purposes.

With it's huge and growing population dependent on little else but this vanishing resource for it's drinking water, something has gotta give - and it will apparently be the ground under people's houses well before any kind of restriction on water usage by corporate/agricultural interests.

Another article from 2010 before all the media hushed up and went silent.

Sinkhole politics. Who gets heard?

Midday on Friday, Gov. Charlie Crist toured a citrus grove in Polk County, noted the "incredible damage" caused by days of freezing temperatures and signed a letter asking for federal disaster relief for Florida's farmers.

That same afternoon, Sergio Plaza stood quietly, a protective arm around his 7-year-old daughter, staring at his condemned house. His driveway and front yard are no more, consumed by a 35- to 40-foot sinkhole Wednesday. The Plant City home he bought in 1991 on a friendly residential cul-de-sac now teeters on the edge of a pit.

...Strawberry city

Living with misery and anxiety breeds resentment, even in the small town of Plant City, the strawberriest place on Earth. With its berry-bedecked downtown decor, its annual strawberry festival and the crowning of wholesome strawberry queens, the city owes much to its farmers.

..But Plant City residents are starting to grumble that everyone from the mayor to the governor care far more about the farmers than the little guy.

I think it was on NPR. As I recall, a man calling himself a 'sinkhole consultant' and with a company called 'sinkhole consulting' gave an interview and pretty much blamed sinkholes on everything but creating vast hollowed-out spaces not far under infrastructure of all kinds by pumping water out of the ground. REPEAT, I said RECALL Save your 'got it wrong' comments, please.
It might be on public radio website(s). Check it out.

when asked what caused this, "there is a layer of clay on top of the limestone and when the clay is gone, a sinkhole is formed".



I've only been here for about 35 years and haven't found much clay on the surface, how about you native guys?

But I am a lifelong Floridian and never saw any clay anywhere else. Spin and propaganda.

I'd like to think BayNews9 would be more honest. But it seems to be evolving into part of the spin machine.

sometime watch al ruchel (?), you'll see what I mean.

back to the original, Seffner doesn't have a clay layer, as you said it's just spin. We wouldn't want the Strawberry Festival, which is in swing right now, to be blamed for anything.

Seems recently, or at least I maybe just noticed, his interviews have been skewed to the right quite a bit. I had to look him up to check spelling. He's been annoying me lately.

http://www.baynews9.com/content/news/baynews9/news/about/bios/al-ruechel.html

Rec

at many of the public meetings with Santa Fe WMD, Suwannee WMD, et al throughout the year.

Many of the complaints involve the use of vast amount of water by the large/corporate dairies/farms while at the same time smaller users (residences and smaller farms) are encouraged to limit water use, often with mandatory restrictions placed on that usage.

The irony of all that is too obvious.

Because Agri-businesses are members of that exclusive club of corporate megalomaniacs who own and control the majority of our planets' resources. To them, profit (and the commiserate power) is the sole pinnacle.

pursuit of wealth.

Good to see you MF! How are you these days my old friend?

Wow! WTF is going on in FLA?? I had no idea things were this bad. I learned much from the OP and the subsequent posts from others.

Threads like this are what made/make DU great.

Take care MF and watch out for those damn holes!



Julie

Good to see you.

So if I buy strawberries I am paying more for them than just the store price. I need water much more than an occasional strawberry desert. Who decides how much water the strawberry farmers get ...and does Adam Putnam or any other assholes get kick backs from these farmers? ...and are these farmers fronts for some corporation? If they are then that would explain the abuse of our natural resources quite well.

a DUgle ...

https://www.google.com/search?q=strawberry+sinkhole&sitesearch=democraticunderground.com

but I haven't read anything about this in the Money$treamMedia.

That one 2010 article I posted from the Tampa Bay Times

This reminds me of a recent three-part documentary I watched concerning the dust bowl. Because farmers in the central heartland plowed under the native grasses that kept the top soil in place; it created a massive environmental disaster that affected the entire economy of the US. The resulting devastation and environmental imbalance took close to a decade to recover from. Unbelievable what damage was done. Now we are on the way to completely destroying our natural aquifers from fracking and massive pumping.

This is highly informative mad. I'll make sure to spread the word.

It's really sad. For that guy we met to be told that he could not wait for the insurance assessment, just get out because we were going to have another freeze. The utter nerve.

Karst topography is caused by groundwater flowing through limestone strata. Groundwater is naturally slightly acidic and over time, the acid dissolves the limestone. This creates random openings in the rock. Over the course of time, these openings get larger and become caverns. Carlsbad Caverns, Mammoth Caves, Lewis and Clark Cavern are three such features. If the caverns are close to the surface or become large enough, the top collapses and produces a sinkhole. The locations and timing of sinkhole events are relatively random and unpredictable. In the case of the Florida sinkholes and the aquifer fluctuations, a full aquifer will exert upward pressure that helps support overlying rock and structures, but that support is ultimately temporary. In true geologic fashion, the full aquifer patiently continues to dissolve the limestone, thinning and weakening the rock, inevitably resulting in a sinkhole. It is estimated that >90% of Florida lakes are filled in sinkholes.

http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/publications/ofr/00-180/intro/karst.html

http://webworldwonders.firn.edu/cameras/piney_z/sa/kid_web_projects/KathyG/index.html
1

On my Kos post the spin has started, and it is ridiculous. Of course sinkholes happen, but it is just plain ignorant and stupid to pretend that depleted the aquifer is not making it worse.

That is just ridiculous spin.

If we do not insist our natural resources are protected. To drill for oil and gas, they need water. Often what is available in the dusty regions where they drill for oil is the water from aquifers - some of them very deep. And they can drill horizontally for both. Eventually, water will become the new "oil", more valuable because of its scarcity as climate change dries out our planet.

Might have an impact on the stability of the surface?!

Land management practices in the US are still stuck with the mentality that everywhere is central England.

Now I know the rest of the story. This is what needs to make news!