If you are concerned about unknowingly buying a house over a sinkhole and getting stuck with a huge problem, you are not alone. Florida has the distinction of having more sinkholes than any other state in the nation and, although the Tampa Bay area has the highest incidence of sinkholes, our own Alachua County and the surrounding area have plenty of them popping up—or, more accurately, down—each year.
The increasing millions of gallons of water that are extracted from the underground aquifer annually for our growing population and the agriculture industry are partially to blame. But sinkholes that collapsed thousands of years ago, now filled with towering trees and considered stable, dot our area. Devil’s Millhopper State Park, on the north side of Gainesville, is one of the largest ancient sinkholes. The bowl-shaped cavity is 120 feet deep and visitors that walk the stairs down to the bottom see streams trickling out of crevices in the limestone walls that lead to a miniature rain forest below. Suburban housing developments now surround the park.
The Florida Department of Financial Services has five recommendations for evaluating a property for possible sinkhole activity that you are considering buying. Their brief statements on each are in shown in italics, and we have added further explanatory notes and comments afterwards.
