(CNN) -- At least 115 people have died after a tropical storm battered Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador over the weekend, officials in those countries reported.
Guatemala was hit hardest, with at least 92 deaths, 54 people missing and 59 injured, emergency officials said. Nearly 112,000 people have been evacuated and more than 29,000 areliving in temporary shelters, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said in an address to the nation late Sunday.
The devastation has been widespread throughout Guatemala with mudslides destroying homes and buildings and burying some victims. At least nine rivers have dramatically higher levels and 13 bridges have collapsed, the nation's emergency services said.
In the northern part of Guatemala City, the downpour created a giant sinkhole that swallowed up a space larger than the area of a street intersection. Residents told CNN that a three-story building and a house fell into the hole.
A local newspaper reported that a private security guard was killed when the sinkhole opened up, but authorities had not confirmed the fatality. Residents said that a poor sewage drainage system underground was to blame for the sinkhole. A similar hole opened up nearby last year, they said.
Classes have been canceled this week throughout the nation.
In Honduras, where 14 people have died, President Porfirio Lobo declared a state of emergency Sunday.
Nearly 3,500 people have been evacuated from their homes and nearly 3,300 are living in shelters, the Honduran emergency agency said Monday. More than 140 homes have been destroyed and another 700 have been damaged, the Permanent Commission for Emergencies reported.
The situation in El Salvador, where nine people died, was improving Monday, officials said. The rain stopped Sunday afternoon and river levels were beginning to diminish, officials said. Classes nationwide remained canceled, however, until further notice.
More rain was possibly forecast for Monday, though, and Salvadoran officials said they were closely monitoring the situation.
Agatha was demoted from a tropical storm to a tropical depression Saturday night and lost its status as a depression Sunday evening.
It was the first named storm for the Pacific hurricane season. The Atlantic hurricane season starts Tuesday.
And here's the picture:
Unreal.
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I wonder how deep and expansive that cavern is and how many others like it are beneath the city.
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That looks like the Martians opened fire with their Orbital Death Cannon. A special effect. I had no idea that a sinkhole could form like that.
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My first reaction was "That can't be real. It has to be a Photoshop." I mean, look at that thing. It's just a yawning maw into nothingness. A HUGE yawning maw into nothingness.
It's good that there's only been a relatively few deaths. Things that big and apparently sudden have a potential to have been much worse disasters. As it stands, though, I wonder how the city's going to deal with repairing this kind of damage. Or how this affects the integrity of the ground around the place.
Holy shit. So what happens next? Does the government just leave a huge hole in the ground, or does it ship in a ton of dirt to fill it in?
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I don't think that's a photoshop, Guatemala City has had a number huge sinkhole in recent years one of which was over 300 feet deep. This one is likely in the same class. The city is built on top of limestone covered in volcanic ash, and already has extensive cave systems under it, not good all and all. The whole region is pretty awful in terms of geological stability. Odds are a leaking pipe has been growing this sinkhole for years, the storm just waterlogged the surface enough to make it fall in.
They'll fill it in with hundreds if not thousands of truckloads of gravel and rocks.
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I don't think that's a photoshop, Guatemala City has had a number huge sinkhole in recent years one of which was over 300 feet deep. This one is likely in the same class. The city is built on top of limestone covered in volcanic ash, and already has extensive cave systems under it, not good all and all. The whole region is pretty awful in terms of geological stability.
Though so. It seems like another city that was built on the wrong spot. At least, a wrong spot for an industrialized city.
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That's the kind of image you'd expect to see in Doctor Who or some random episode of The Outer Limits or something where the underground mole men are coming or the aliens scooped up the ground.
I mean I would not like to be anywhere near that creepy place, damn. Hope there aren't more of those waiting to be uncovered.
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Gramzamber wrote:That's the kind of image you'd expect to see in Doctor Who or some random episode of The Outer Limits or something where the underground mole men are coming or the aliens scooped up the ground.
I mean I would not like to be anywhere near that creepy place, damn. Hope there aren't more of those waiting to be uncovered.
I'm betting there's at least a half-dozen potential holes there waiting for the right combination of rain and rock fractures. The only thing that's surprising to me is how the material can just erode away like that.
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Yeah, that reminded me of the last one. I remember it because conspiracy theorists claimed it was caused by some experimental US antimatter weapon. Obviously, the US really fucking hates Guatemala and will do anything to make their lives miserable
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My first thought was - it is photo shopped. I have never seen a sinkhole so round with so steep and cleanly formed walls.
That city urgently needs geological survey to find and map the potentially dangerous locations especially if it is so common for sinkholes to form there.
Sky Captain wrote:My first thought was - it is photo shopped. I have never seen a sinkhole so round with so steep and cleanly formed walls.
That city urgently needs geological survey to find and map the potentially dangerous locations especially if it is so common for sinkholes to form there.
There was one just like this a couple of years ago. That's not a photoshop.
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I wonder how that works though, is there a sudden collapse as all the bedrock or whatever just sinks into a hollow cavity deep within the Earth?
EDIT:
Holy crap, I had an awesome Shepesque idea! Can one build an ICBM silo in a sinkhole?
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Sky Captain wrote:My first thought was - it is photo shopped. I have never seen a sinkhole so round with so steep and cleanly formed walls.
That city urgently needs geological survey to find and map the potentially dangerous locations especially if it is so common for sinkholes to form there.
There was one just like this a couple of years ago. That's not a photoshop.
Guatemala City have to had some special geological structure under it so sinkholes that deep and steep can form. Most sinkholes I have seen here are just irregular depressions in the ground few meters deep and 10 - 30 m across. Nothing even close to this hole.
And if Guatemala gets sinkholes like this on a semi-regular basis, they really, really, really need to do a geological survey, at the very least.
Appealing for UN help to fill in those massive underground caves (or at least shore them up), would also be called for.
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The only solution would be to move the city. Even if you could fill all the underground cavities with cement, which could easily require millions of tons of the stuff, you'd just force the water into different areas were it will quickly get to work dissolving new ones. Also cement isn't fully waterproof, so it can't even ensure the stability of a localized area.
Right now it's better leave the situation the way it is, and work in fixing water mains to slow down the rate of sinkhole formation. These sinkholes are absurdly deep, but not very wide. The width is what will kill people, depth doesn't matter too much once its more then maybe 20 feet causing any building above to crush. Trying to change the underground geology in some massive project could make the situation much worse by creating wider shallower holes.
You can imagine a hole this kind of diameter would have killed a lot more then 3 people if it formed under city buildings. The largest sinkholes known to exist are close to a kilometer across.
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Chewie probably needs to correct me here, but wouldn't a hole like that form when the roof over a limestone cave weakens and collapses in on itself? Just the dome of the cave would collapse, leaving a nearly perfect hole?
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I wonder how cool it would be to build the cities not on top of the sinkholes, but INSIDE the sinkholes themselves! Like Utapau!
If there's more where this came from, maybe they should start building things inside the holes? Underground communities, how awesome would that be?
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LadyTevar wrote:Chewie probably needs to correct me here, but wouldn't a hole like that form when the roof over a limestone cave weakens and collapses in on itself? Just the dome of the cave would collapse, leaving a nearly perfect hole?
Basically, yes. The problem facing Guatemala City is that its built on some MASSIVELY thick limestone deposits. What happens is somewhere underground you get a tiny fracture, just enough for water to start pooling as it flows through the subsurface. This allows water to collect and dissolve the rock surrounding the fracture at a slightly higher rate, increasing the rate of dissolution relative to its' surroundings. Over time, this hole gets bigger and gravity pulls the water pool down (think of it like water going down a drain, but the motion goes through rock).
This gets you your approximately circular shape, and it is wide because the vertical drive isn't very severe. Eventually, you have a large column of empty space (or water) in the ground. The sink hole could remain this way for thousands of years, but eventually you get something which overwhelms the 'lid', either a small tremor fractures the rock, or erosion from the surface gets it, or in this case the hurricane simply saturated the ground and made it too heavy. Without support, the lid will collapse all the way out to the sides where it isn't undermined. The hole is round because the existing void is round, its not really a 'cave' in the traditional sense.
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