Expert: UC Prone To Natural Sinkholes

The geological formations of the Upper Cumberland make the region prone to experiencing natural sinkholes.

That from Tennessee Tech Civil Engineering Professor Daniel VandenBerge, who said there is a large presence of limestone bedrock in the area. VandenBerge said that limestone partially dissolves when water flows through it and this reaction leads to the formation of caves and cracks that can turn into sinkholes.

“When they do show up, we have some pretty good procedures for essentially clogging them up and filling back to the surface,” VandenBerge said. “But we can’t know a hundred percent where all of them are. There’s just, they do show up occasionally in unexpected places.”

VandenBerge said sinkholes are more noticeable in populated areas but Cookeville does not get them more than the rest of the region. VandenBerge said sinkholes like the one that developed Monday on Cookeville’s Spring Street are usually man-made and caused by issues such as utility leaks.

“If it’s a utility issue then they obviously have to fix the utility and then fill that ground back in,” VandenBerge said. “And in that case there’s not really anywhere else that the soil could go once they have the utility fixed.”

VandenBerge said experts can drill holes, map caves, and use geophysics to determine if a location is at risk of a sinkhole. VandenBerge said these tools are used to make sure a specific site is safe to build on, not to search for sinkholes in a wide large area.

“The main entrance, the opening to Mammoth Cave is a case where there’s a hard, strong rock at the surface and then sometime a long time ago it collapsed and opened up so you could actually get inside the cave,” VandenBerge said. “That can happen around here. My understanding is that’s probably a little less likely in the Cookeville area because we don’t have as much of that really strong rock underlined by the weaker rock. So we actually are fortunate in that regard.”

VandenBerge said the sinkholes seen in cities and towns are often not real sinkholes as there is usually some other cause to the collapse.

“I think it was five or six years ago, a trash truck I believe collapsed into a hole in downtown Cookeville,” VandenBerge said. “People called that a sinkhole. It was really just a sort of a garage below the ground that people forgot was there.”