Most good things always tend to have a negative aspect to them and Spring Hill, FL is no different. This beautiful community of Hernando County is the nation’s prime victim of deadly sinkholes, caused by the invisible underground erosion of the weak soils and limestone that is largely found within the area.
Sinkholes are natural depressions that appear mainly during the rainy seasons. They occur when the limestone below the soil surface dissolves, resulting in a depression or a shift in the soil. Sinkholes tend to vary in size and can appear anywhere, at any time without notice. Other names used to refer to sinkholes include cenote, sink, swallet, and shake hole.
Much of Spring Hill falls within the so-called Sinkhole Alley, which is composed of huge masses of limestone, either exposed or completely covered by a fine layer of soil. The limestone dissolves vigorously as the acidic water oozes through its highly porous structure. Spring Hill’s severe rains and occasional flooding contain a little acidity, which only becomes more and more acidic as the water dissolves the limestone, hence speeding up the underground erosion that eventually leads to the formation of giant subterranean caverns.
The erosion starts mildly and can cause a lot of slow damage to properties, houses, and roads. These can then lead to severe cracks in walls, building foundations, and road surfaces or lead to sinking pools, cracked patios, sagging windows or doors among other things. Eventually, the already formed caverns swallow the ground. A significant number of the small lakes and other water bodies within Spring Hill and the surrounding areas came to be as a result of sinkhole formation.
In extreme scenarios, a home or building collapses into the sinkhole, as has been witnessed several times even recently near Spring Hill, when an unexpected sinkhole partially swallowed a house and man who was enjoying his night’s sleep, and again in Hudson, in the immediate south of Spring Hill, when another house sank into a giant sinkhole roughly 50 ft. deep and 25 ft. wide.
Since time immemorial, the danger of impending sinkholes has been a major threat in an to the ever-growing community of Spring Hill, and the situation has not slowed down. Just this past year a sinkhole swallowed an entire home and part of another, with the homeowners just barely making it out in time. It also made the homes around them unlivable. There are still unreported cases of underground sinkhole activity and the formation of minor sinkholes each year within Spring Hill and Hernando County at large.