That Sinking Feeling...

Three Orange County housing workers arrived last Tuesday at the home of Tommy and Mae Rose Owens in Winter Park, Fla., a suburb of Orlando, to complete paperwork on the couple's federal loan for home improvement. But the Owenses were not there. Neither were the house and the yard. They had fallen--along with five expensive foreign cars, a truck, a parking lot, part of a four-lane road and much of a municipal swimming pool--into a sinkhole. That geological oddity resulted when underground limestone caverns, which are usually filled and strengthened by water, were gradually drained during a severe drought. The caverns collapsed, and a circular hole 340 ft. across and 100 ft. deep opened up in the middle of a busy neighborhood.

Mrs. Owens had watched it start, hearing what she called "a queer swishing noise" and then a "ploop" as a big sycamore tree in the next lot plummeted straight into the earth. She called the police. They could do nothing but cordon off the area as thousands of sightseers arrived to watch the hole grow. The owner of a $40,000 1979 Porsche 928 hired a helicopter and then a construction crane to retrieve his car, in for repairs at a garage bitten into by the hole.

Sinkholes are common in Florida. State law makes sinkhole insurance standard in a homeowner's policy--it covers a house but not, ironically, the land that disappears beneath. As Orange County appraisers last week were pondering what to do about the Owenses' next property tax bill, at least seven more sinkholes opened up elsewhere in the state.

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