It's three weeks old today.
My sinkhole was born on a hot summer afternoon. I was trying to coax our lawn to return to us for the summer by moving a sprinkler around the backyard every half hour or so. Because it was so ungodly hot -- about 85 degrees, intolerable for most Alaskans -- I busied myself with indoor tasks between sprinkler moves. So you can imagine my surprise when, about 5pm, I went out to move the sprinkler again and saw a giant gaping hole in the middle of my backyard, one which had not been there less than an hour previously.
The sinkhole was less impressive then:
But what it lacked in size, it more than made up for in its ability to elicit in me feelings of shock and dismay. It also had the added benefit (having recently been worked with a sprinkler) of water trickling from the edges and making creepy hollow dripping sounds deep in the bowels of the earth. I could not see the bottom.
I managed to neither shriek nor vomit, but I could feel hysteria nibbling at the edges of my consciousness. It wasn't so very long ago, after all, that a guy in Florida disappeared forever as a sinkhole swallowed part of his home, bedroom first. This was his sinkhole:
After pausing a moment to be grateful no human or dog (our family) was hurt, I looked around, first for a hidden camera ("Ha ha, good joke.. whoever you are!") then to try to determine if my own house was in danger of disappearing before my eyes. Somehow, with no sinkhole experience whatsoever, I decided it wasn't. So I did what every Thoroughly Modern Millie would do in this day & age: I googled "sinkhole."
This was not, as it turns out, a good idea. Search Google Images for "sinkhole," and your screen fills up pretty quickly with images like this:
And this:
And this:
Honestly, I thought I contained my hysteria pretty well. After my husband got home ("Guess what, Honey?") and we looked at it together, he stuck an avalanche probe into it and couldn't touch the bottom. So, more than 10 feet deep, at least.
Not wanting to waste the adrenaline, we channeled our energies into the making of this video, mostly for us but also for our Facebook friends:
(OK, so, for some reason the video is being wonky. If it doesn't upload, you'll have to take my word for it: it's pretty damn hilarious, featuring a lint roller handle with a red foam rubber ball as a microphone.)
And then we did nothing. Well, we put a fence around it, called the insurance company to file a claim, and then we did nothing. Well (part two), I did call some muni people to try to discern why, exactly, there was a giant fucking hole spontaneously erupted into my backyard. It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer, even in light of the fact that it turns out some of our neighbors have had similar, if not nearly so dramatic (read: large & deep) situations in their own backyards. One of my cleverer neighbors even convinced some of her friends to help fill in the hole by having a "Sinkhole de Mayo" party, with margaritas and the whole nueve metros.
It turns out our neighborhood was built in the 1950s (prehistoric times by Anchorage standards), and back then, people used to have subterranean holding tanks or cisterns with wooden "cribs" around them. Once the neighborhood joined the city sewer system, the cisterns were removed, and the holes were filled in... supposedly. Evidently, some residents filled them improperly or never filled them at all, creating future potential sinkholes. Unfortunately, no municipal maps exist to show where these cisterns are, so .... tick, tick, tick, Boom. Near as I could find, it looks something like this, only with a giant gaping hole where the flower garden is:
In any case, insurance-wise, nothing continued to happen for another week or so, while we waited for the insurance company (I don't want to name names here, so let's call it Callshate) to do what insurance companies do best: Nothing.
Finally I grew tired of nothing, so I did what I do best: Pester people. (Squeaky wheel, and all that.) After about a week of living with a giant gaping hole in our backyard, an adjuster from Callshate arrived and tried to tell my husband that I caused the sinkhole by watering the lawn too much. To his credit, he did retract his statement when he realized the sinkhole was 18 feet deep at one end. He said he'd write a report and get back to us.
Cue: more nothing.
Long story short, Callshate told us to ... well, they told us they weren't going to cover it. I never did get a good reason, but evidently it's spelled out under Subsection 314, Paragraph 7B on page 624 of my homeowner's policy. Furthermore, I would like to commend Callshate on hiring some of the least imaginative people possible, since they were not even remotely interested in playing the "What If" game: What if the sinkhole HAD injured a person (say, me, for instance)? What if it HAD damaged a building on the property? Why was ice-storm damage to our trees covered some years ago, when there weren't any people or buildings damaged at that time, either? (Ok, that last one isn't a What-If, but they wouldn't answer that one, either.)
So now the sinkhole is ours, all ours! We tried to take the additional responsible step of hiring an engineer to come look at it and advise us on how best to be certain it's repaired such that this -- and I cannot stress this enough -- never happens again. Unfortunately, engineers in Anchorage are all busy doing important engineering-type things ($$$$) and cannot be bothered to help out a simple little homeowner ($), so we're really on our own.
Today was Day One of the rest of our Sinkhole Summer. My mind is a whirlwind of these sorts of images:
Wish us luck, and stay tuned for more Sinkhole Diaries!
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