Ten little Guilin Expats went out to dine,
one fell into a pothole, reducing them to nine…
Guilin is situated in the “center of a 540,000 square km belt of some of the finest subtropical tower karst known”* Some people even call it the international capital of karst.
Now, karst has a feature of being water soluble, which often results in caves being created. Normally caves form underground, slowly moving upwards when the cave is getting bigger and rocks fall from the ceiling, thus reducing the thickness of the covering limestone.
When the covering limestone gets to thin, they collapse, producing collapse dolines. This is exactly what happened last week in Chuan Shan Dong Lu , creating a giant pothole in the middle of the street.
City management was busy shoveling dirt for a whole day before the hole was filled.
The downside of only shoveling dirt to close the hole is that now the water can not only continue its destructive process from underground, but also rain can enter from the top, speeding up the process. We are sure that this “pothole”will pop up (or cave in) again in the future.
Below two photos of a similar incident that happened in May 2007 in front of the entrance to Seven Star Park. That time it was filled properly by drilling boreholes into the ground and cement the rubble by pumping concrete into it.
* Source: Ru Jin Wen, Karst in Guilin, 1991 University of Science and Technology of China Publishing House
** First two pictures taken from news.xinmin.cn