In the early hours of October 17, 2025, the streets of Koreatown in Los Angeles were abruptly transformed. A sinkhole, triggered by a broken water main beneath the intersection of Saint Andrews Place and 4th Street, yawned open in the middle of the road around 2:30 a.m., leaving behind a muddy mess and at least one damaged car, according to KABC. As repair crews scrambled to contain the chaos, the event underscored a growing national concern: America’s infrastructure is literally collapsing beneath our feet, and sinkholes are emerging as a costly and dangerous symptom of deeper problems.
Just two days earlier, on October 15, 2025, another startling incident unfolded in Morgantown, West Virginia. A city firetruck, responding to what turned out to be a false alarm at the Central Place student apartment complex, became stuck in a sinkhole at 475 Baird St. As city officials told WBOY, the ground gave way beneath the rear of the vehicle as it was leaving the property, immobilizing the truck. Thankfully, no injuries were reported, but the firetruck remained out of service while awaiting a full damage assessment. The Morgantown Police Department documented the incident, adding yet another entry to the growing ledger of sinkhole-related emergencies.
While these events might sound like the stuff of urban legend, for many Americans, sinkholes are an all-too-real hazard. On April 28, 2024, Jaquila Goodman, her fiancé Sylvester Degrate, and their four-year-old daughter were driving along FM 2989 in Walker County, Texas, when their car suddenly plummeted into a sinkhole. The family was returning from Huntsville, navigating storm-battered roads swollen by relentless rain and overflowing creeks. As Goodman later recounted to a reporter, “It felt like a bottomless pit.” The car nose-dived into a rapidly expanding chasm—over 30 feet deep and 20 feet wide—deploying airbags and shattering the windshield. Water surged into the vehicle. With seconds to spare, Degrate managed to force open a back door, and the family escaped, battered but alive. Goodman suffered a broken kneecap and injuries to her neck and back; Degrate broke the orbital bones in both his eyes. Their daughter was left with a scar across her eyebrow and a lasting fear of ditches.
Their ordeal, as detailed in Slate, highlights a grim reality: sinkholes are not isolated flukes but recurring threats across the United States. George Veni, a hydrogeologist and longtime executive director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute, notes that the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates sinkholes cause at least $300 million in road damage annually—though the true total, factoring in related losses, may exceed $1 billion each year. That’s on par with the annual cost of tornado damage in America, but unlike tornadoes or floods, sinkholes rarely garner national headlines. “Fires and floods happen at one time and place where their magnitude is seen. The magnitude of sinkholes remains generally hidden,” Veni explains.
The causes of sinkholes are as varied as the places they appear. In Los Angeles, the culprit was a broken water main. In Texas, relentless rain and an aging culvert undermined the road. In New Jersey, the ground began to collapse under Interstate 80 in Morris County on December 26, 2024, opening a 40-foot-wide and deep void. The New Jersey Department of Transportation described it as a “significant void”—a phrase as existential as it is practical. The cause? Collapsed mineshafts, remnants of an era when the region was honeycombed with underground tunnels. The state has 588 abandoned mines, many dating back to the 1800s, and the older the mine, the greater the risk of collapse, Veni told Slate.
Across the country, nearly half a million abandoned mines lurk beneath the surface. But mines aren’t the only culprits. In Texas, the infamous Daisetta sinkhole swallowed oil tanks, trees, telephone poles, and several cars when it first appeared in 2008, eventually growing to a staggering 900 feet wide and 260 feet deep before stabilizing—only to start expanding again in 2023. Florida, too, is a hotspot for sinkholes, thanks to the fluctuating water table of the Floridan aquifer. In 2013, a sinkhole in Seffner opened beneath a family home, killing one resident. Veni’s research suggests that “induced sinkholes” are eleven times more likely to occur in urban areas, a sobering statistic for America’s rapidly developing cities and suburbs.
Sinkholes threaten more than just roads and vehicles. They imperil telecommunications, electrical lines, water mains, and gas pipelines—critical lifelines for modern life. Repairing a sinkhole is no small feat. Crews must test the road’s base, drill and grout smaller holes, excavate the collapsed area down to the rock, lay stone and gravel, pour concrete slabs, and rebuild with compacted soil and asphalt. The process can take months, as New Jersey drivers and business owners learned during the lengthy closure of I-80. Local businesses lost revenue, and residents worried about structural damage to their homes as traffic was rerouted onto already congested side streets.
So, what’s being done to stem the tide? Some states, especially those most affected like Florida, have tried to be proactive. Hydrogeologic assessments can help predict risk, but they are expensive and time-consuming. Veni notes that most clients—public and private—prefer to save money by using only one geophysical tool, but experts recommend multiple tests for accuracy. Ultimately, only drilling can reveal whether a site is truly susceptible to collapse, but that’s costly and disruptive.
New engineering methods offer a glimmer of hope. For highways, Veni describes “building a net of cables into sections of roads where the risk of collapse is higher to prevent vehicles from falling into a hole during an abrupt collapse.” Dynamic compaction, which involves repeatedly dropping heavy weights to collapse and compact the soil, is another strategy. And researchers at the University of Cambridge and Penn State are experimenting with embedded fiber-optic cables to monitor roadways for early warning signs of sinkhole formation.
Yet, for families like Goodman’s and communities from Los Angeles to Morgantown, the reality is that sinkholes remain a persistent and unpredictable threat. Goodman, still recovering a year and a half after her ordeal, told Slate, “Mentally we’re still struggling. My fiancé needs glasses. My neck, back, knee constantly hurt.” Her daughter’s warning to others—“be careful of the ditch”—echoes a lesson that policymakers and engineers are only beginning to heed.
From water mains in California to abandoned mines in New Jersey, America’s sinkholes are exposing the cracks in our infrastructure and the urgent need for investment, innovation, and vigilance. Until then, the ground beneath our feet—and our roads—remains a question mark.
