LAKELAND – A large sinkhole has opened near Scott Lake in Lakeland.
What you need to know
The hole is located at Scott Lake Road and Fitzgerald Road in the south part of town
No damage was reported
The location is near where a large sinkhole opened in 2006
The hole is located at Scott Lake Road and Fitzgerald Road in the south part of town.
Officials said at an afternoon news conference that the hole is about 75 feet wide. Crews were working to fill the hole to stabilize it.
“A private company hired by an owner, drilling on the private road, hit a pressure pocket, causing the collapse. Owners are assessing the situation at the site,” the county said in an evening news release.
Experts say the crew was drilling a well and got about 180 feet before breaking through a hard casing that opened up into a 300-foot gap.
“This is a pretty high area of Florida,” said University of South Florida engineering professor Nicholas Albergo. “I think it’s about 168 feet above sea level. So you can imagine there’s a fair amount of weight that’s going on our limestone, which can be very brittle, very cavernous.”
Albergo said drilling into the open space underground could have caused a drop in water pressure and anything that was previously held by the water would become dead weight.
“The amount of weight we’re talking about could have been enough to cause a collapse or a rupture through that limited junction,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be very big at this point. A hole will manifest itself pretty quickly.”
There are three homes in the area, but no structural damage was reported. No evacuations have been ordered, but residents of the homes were told to be prepared to leave if necessary.
Fitzgerald Road was closed and officials did not have an estimate of when it would reopen.
The area of the sinkhole is very close to a site where a sinkhole swallowed parts of Scott Lake in 2006.
That hole took so much water out of the lake that neighbors could see the bottom of the lake.
Jack Hall has lived in the area since 1989 and described what happened in the 2006 incident.
“Just one hole across the lake, it dropped in level quickly and eventually plugged and came back up,” he said.
Hall said he has braced his home for sinkholes, but said Friday he’s not particularly worried about the hole that’s formed now.
“Having had a collapse claim on my home, I’ve learned a lot,” he said. “And personally, I’m not that worried about it. This is a sinkhole area, and that’s the nature of the property.”
The sinkhole is located at Scott Lake Road and Fitzgerald Road in the south part of town.
