I am not a geologist, only an observationist. There seems to be a direct correlation between pumping large amounts of water out of the ground and sinkholes. For instance, when there are hard freezes in Polk county and sprinklers are being run several nights in a row to protect the strawberry plants, then hundreds of sinkholes develop shortly thereafter.
Quoting from Tampa Bay Times: "Heavy rains, massive pumping of groundwater and other factors can speed sinkhole formation, but Florida's Swiss-cheese geology and sandy soil have remained the same for eons. Thus no natural events explain the explosion in sinkhole claims in the past five years".
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