GOIN’ DOWN?

What’s so funny about this? Sinkholes are amazing and scary. You read about giant ones opening up and swallowing entire houses. I guess they are kind of like slow earthquakes, though their appearance can be quite sudden. Where I grew up in Pennsylvania, I remember seeing small ones in the streets of my neighborhood. Occasionally they appear here on Staten Island too. When urban planners lay out streets and neighborhoods, their designs are limited to the surface of the earth. They pay little to no attention to what lies under the surface unless there is a known problem which has manifested itself in the past. But the earth is hardly solid underground. There are air pockets and water pockets and little fault lines all over the place. Just today I read an article about how oil companies were causing earthquakes in Oklahoma by injecting their billions of gallons of waste water into the ground. And you wonder why California is drying up. Even though the topic of this joke is sinkholes and t