Sinkhole opens along Watercourse Road
(CNS): Police are warning West Bay drivers that a sinkhole opened today along the side of Watercourse Road in the aftermath of Tuesday’s 7.7M earthquake and as many as 16 aftershocks. The report was made at around 2:30pm about the relatively small hole, located between Eureka Drive and Hamlet Lane. Officers have marked out the area for motorists.
Drivers who cannot avoid that road are being asked to proceed with caution. The National Roads Authority has been informed and will be addressing the sinkhole as soon as they can.
The RCIPS thanked the public for their cooperation and encouraged anyone who comes across any other sinkholes or other disruption to the flow of traffic to call 911.
Meanwhile, as holes open in roads, water leaks also continue to spring up. Although the Water Authority had done a full system check and reconnected almost all of their customers to the supply, they are still having to revisit areas and attend to fresh or newly discovered leaking or burst pipes.
Ironically, among a number of leaks the authority dealt with on Thursday, one was on Water Street, in Newlands Estates.
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Category: Local News, Utilities
We already know where all the Aquifers are on all the islands. East End has the largest in miles wide by miles long and 800 feet deep. Plenty of fresh water, I just don’t understand why we don’t decentralize George Town and put anymore schools further East of Savanna. Ease up traffic and move these children in School Busses. But it is a temporary solution.
Good. A new hiding spot for the guns and drugs.
I thought we were having another aftershock this morning… then I realized it was the police helicopter flying over the area!
I don’t think this earthquake “caused” the sinkholes but neither did drilling. Over the years most of our roads are simply widened and paved over the original tracks which existed. There were always these holes, crevices and caves but they were paved over or, in some cases, built on after filling the surface. So this earthquake (and others previous) simply opened them.
Or in simply terms – no proper foundation for the blacktop. I come from a rural area of England and it’s the same there. Heavy rain and hard frosts open up the old dirt underneath.
Now again, and with the hurricane experience, government needs to allow people to build homes on columns, elevated, without having to pay double the Planning fees just because a home is elevated off the ground.
That Planning restriction and the associated costs to build higher and safer makes no sense on a flat island!
Can some sensible MLA please make a motion to amend this?
Ms Barbara..please!
4.7 M 1:58pm 43 km SSE of east end, Cayman islands. 43km= 26.7 miles. This one is too close.
So as aftershocks continue more sinkholes and waterlines breaks would appear. Prepare yourself to that.
Preparations are good but the most important is to prepare our souls for the now and the hereafter!! Everything else is like chasing after the wind!!
Our island is made of Swiss Cheese, subterranean caves and crevices everywhere. I hope the next one doesn’t crack our little stalagmite of an island and send us crashing into the abyss🙄
Stop drilling…..NRA, Dart?
Drilling has absolutely nothing to do with this. Caymans underground formation has plenty of cavities/voids. The earthquake that we just experienced caused a few of those cavities to collapse therefore creating these sinkholes.
You can ask CUC about their experiences planting poles at regular spacing along most roads and how many piles drop an extra foot or more.
All this drill is just weakening what nice was a solid formation that we live on. Every deep we’ll inundates us with water, weakens the core of these island and guess what happens next.
So now sinkholes can form anywhere? What if one forms under someone’s car? Or house? What shocked me after the earthquake was how hollow it is underground, we need to stop drilling!
Sweetie, drilling didn’t cause the sinkholes. The earthquake did.
The cavities were already there. Function of being built in top of a mix of limestone, which erodes in contact with water , and marl. The earthquake shook the marl, which then flowed into the existing cracks, crevices and caves. Think this is a problem wait until a) someone tries to put a 5o story tower on top of this foundation b) we try and put pilings into the seabed to hold a dock 80 ft above the sea bottom.