Sinkholes are not unusual in Nova Scotia: scientists
Chris Strickey and his family watched a decade of memories disappear slowly into the ground.
“It’s tough for my family because everybody has just in essence the clothes on their backs,” Strickey said Tuesday, describing the devastation of seeing the twostorey brick-and-wood family home descend into a giant sinkhole.
“There are lots of memories that can’t be replaced and that will be lost. As recently as Friday, the girls were shopping, spent a lot of their own money on new stuff that they’ve never worn.”
Daughters Julia, 16, and Gabby, 13, were preparing for the new school year before the sinkhole began to envelop their Falmouth home in the early hours of Sunday morning.
“Basically, it was just soil that had collapsed,” Strickey said, repeating an assessment from the Municipality of West Hants that attempted to dispel a theory that the gypsum deposits that are prevalent in the area could be responsible for creating the sinkhole.
But a pair of geologists are not convinced that a gypsum sinkhole is not at fault.
“Around Windsor, there is a different kind of rock,” said Ian Spooner, head of the Earth and Environmental Science department at Acadia University in Wolfville.
“We call them chemical sediments. Gypsum is one of them but there is limestone and there is salt in the area too.”
Spooner said the sediment is prevalent in the area stretching from Windsor toward Truro along Highway 14.
“It’s quite prone to groundwater dissolving it and when that happens, you open up cavities in the bedrock at depth that can occasionally show themselves at the surface,” said Spooner as he prepared for Acadia’s first day of classes.
“These sinkholes can be any size, a few metres to tens of metres. Also, it is very hard to understand where they may appear. Big sinkholes like the one that appeared in Falmouth are certainly not uncommon.”
Bob Ryan, manager of mineral resource evaluation with the provincial Natural Resources Department, said he feels bad for the Strickey family but agrees that a Falmouth subdivision and surrounding terrain would be susceptible to sinkhole activity.
“Certainly, it lies within an area that we have mapped as having high potential for sinkholes,” Ryan said.
He said land does not betray sinkhole tendencies. It’s not spongy and there are no open cracks.
Home builders and homeowners are rarely aware of the potential for sinkholes, underground caves that Ryan said may have been forming over hundreds of thousands of years.
Spooner said the terrain in Nova Scotia is different than that of places like Georgia or Florida, where catastrophic and gigantic sinkholes develop.
In non-glacial terrain, the sinkholes can wreak much more devastation, he said.
“The reason we have all these wonderful farms in the Valley and places like that is because of the thick till. That thick till tends to mask the underlying problem of the rock dissolving but it still doesn’t get rid of the hazard, which is collapse.”
Strickey said a house collapse happening in Nova Scotia was something that he never imagined.
“As you can probably appreciate, there has been a wonderful outpouring of support from friends and family and colleagues,” said Strickey, the admissions director for King’s-Edgehill private school. “There have been lots of offers from people to put us up because obviously we’re homeless.”
The Strickeys have even had the offer of living in a nearby winterized cottage owned by one of their friends.
“We might go there at least for now until we can get our ducks in a row and get a plan going forward.”