Summer Pastime: Watch a Sinkhole
Catawba Valley folks gather around as the ground opens up again
July 12, 2005
GREG LACOUR, Staff Writer
Charlotte Observer
Photo: A work crew arrives to block off access to the grand reopening of the Buffalo's Southwest Grill sinkhole in Hickory on July 7.
HICKORY - Nothing captures the imaginations of Catawba Valley residents like a sinkhole.
They have two new ones to peruse, in two restaurant parking lots, one the site of an infamous sinkhole three years ago. They opened up Thursday in rain from what was left of Tropical Storm Cindy. Now, as then, people come from miles around to sinkhole-watch.
"It's an unusual occurrence," Granite Falls resident Jeff Johnston said Monday near the hole at McGuffey's, a restaurant on U.S. 321.
Ashley Keller, also of Granite Falls: "The whole place could fall in. It's starting to spread, too."
Her mother, Katrina Keller: "This doesn't happen every day."
But in Hickory, it happens enough.
Heavy rain caused a hole in the Lowes supermarket parking lot, right next to McGuffey's, in the early 1990s. Three years ago, runoff from a thunderstorm ruptured a drainage pipe under Buffalo's Southwest Cafe on U.S. 70 and opened two infamous holes that later merged. Now these two: McGuffey's and a grand reopening of the Buffalo's sinkhole, in the lot of a restaurant that closed last year.
The holes are magnetic. People can't stay away, even if they're risking their necks.
James Thompson III has been watching the McGuffey's hole since it opened Thursday. He's a security guard hired by the owner, and on his first night, he said, he saw in the beam of his flashlight two boys ducking behind the restaurant.
"I caught up to them just as one was sticking his foot in," Thompson recalled Monday. "The idiot was trying to climb in the hole."
Link to Article Source
|
|
