National Geographic and Sinkholes

Well, its been a while, but I just got back from a couple of weeks away, visiting some of our construction projects. At one Philly site, I installed a new bathroom-complete with refinishing a clawfoot tub before hooking it up. It had those 60's flower stickers on it, among other issues, that were impossible to remove. Only wish the sentiments that went along with those flowers lasted as long as the stickers did...

All that work however, did not keep me from pursuing one of my favorite hobbies—reading nonfiction (because its all pretty much as a tale anyway). And, recently I came across two discussions that referred my thoughts directly back to the place I now call “home.”

First, the National Geographic’s “109 Destinations Rated” (Nov/Dec 2008) took the time to mention Lancaster County, PA, in its list. Only, they placed it number two in its “Worst-Rated Places” category. Their reasoning was that “The Amish are lost amid the sprawl and schlock.”

I remembered this rating recently because of the feelings generated every time I drive by the two new banks that are being constructed on two of our major roads here. I can’t help but see in this construction the un-tempered sprawl that NG was drawing attention to by placing Lancaster County, PA in its list of worst-rated places. Both these new construction projects are classic examples of our “traditional” construction techniques, which rely heavily on building new, building fast, and on interfering with—rather than working with, the natural processes our creator gifted upon us for dealing with stormwater runoff, filtering our drinking water, and providing firmament and temperature modification for our shelters/buildings. By covering significant land area with impervious materials, by eradicating all vegetation from construction sites, and by ignoring the usefulness and ethicality of “recycling” existing buildings, we have made our lax acceptance of sprawl known to people worldwide.

The second discussion that referred my thoughts back to this area was found in Thurman and Trujullos’s Essentials of Oceanography text. In their chapter on Marine Sediments, they describe marine processes that also can be found on land, namely, that of how groundwater filtration through limestone produces sinkholes. Now, combine that info with the DEP’s, the EPA’s, and every water-conservation agency’s and municipal stormwater agency’s explanation describing how creating impervious land areas and removing one of the most effective tools for sucking up water—vegetation, namely trees, and you have to ask how effective it is to keep “plugging” the sinkhole on route 422. Wouldn’t it make more sense to deal with the etiology and not the symptoms?

Obviously, now that there are no—as in ZERO, trees there to mitigate the thousands of gallons of groundwater moving across the surface and into the limestone, and now that the total penetrable surface area has been so drastically reduced as to exacerbate the flow rate of groundwater through the limestone on that site, logic tells us that this sinkhole is only going to get worse unless we abandoned this ineffectual and unsustainable affection for sprawl that is being followed here.