ABSTRACT
The occurrence of subsidence and sinkholes is reported and documented each year in parts of the United States and many other countries in the world underlain by carbonate rocks. Despite frequent land subsidence, road collapses, stream disappearances, and other karst manifestations, subsidence and sinkhole education and management have only recently been addressed. Karst is frequently characterized by karrens, dolines (sinkholes), shafts, poljes, caves, ponors (swallow holes), caverns, estavelles, intermittent springs, submarine springs, lost rivers, dry river valleys, karst plains, irregular surfaces with pinnacles, cutters, and collapses. Karst geology, exacerbated by mining, construction practices, and storm water drainage, is a source of havoc and humor.1-4 Hundreds of sinkholes and thousands of landscape depressions (i.e., including sinkhole forming or lling) may occur within a band of carbonate bedrock. Great potential for damage exists when any structure including buildings (residential, ofce blocks, commercial, and industrial), pipelines, roads, railroads, airports, lakes, waste lagoons, stockpiles, and landlls are built in areas of karst terrain. Sinkhole-related failures not only can cause signicant property and environmental damage but also pose serious threats to the lives and economic and emotional well-being of those involved.5,6
Karst terrain and sinkhole-prone areas present special problems, mining difculties, and management concerns of the pits, as well as challenges for the design and construction of a development because of the variable and changeable nature of the soil and rocks that may support the structure.6 Concern related to subsidence and sinkhole occurrence must also be considered, and preventive measures taken to mitigate or minimize the natural and anthropogenic forces that drive the mechanisms of sinkhole formation.
