When residents of 1157 Lincoln Street in Blakely went to sleep on Friday evening, their car was seemingly parked safely in their driveway.
At about 1 a.m., they woke up to find that car was swallowed up by a sinkhole.
The Lincoln Street residents immediately reported the incident and crews rushed to the scene, first to evaluate the situation and then to come up with a plan to get the damaged vehicle out of the hole.
Blakely Hose Company No. 2 Fire Chief Ed Santarangelo said sinkholes are common in the area because there are underground mines, but not sinkholes big enough to suck in a vehicle.
He estimated that the hole was about 15 feet wide and 20 feet deep.
A crew from NEPA Towing and Recovery was called to the scene, secured the vehicle with special straps, and removed the car from the hole in about an hour.
The car, an older model Honda, was heavily damaged and not drivable, Santarangelo said.
“The borough manager is still working on a cause,” Santarangelo said. “When we left at 3:30 this morning, they were still working to find out what caused it.”
UGI and the water company also responded to the scene and residents lost both water and power for a period of time, he said.
There was also a water main break in the area and responders don’t yet know whether the break caused the sinkhole or the sinkhole caused the break, Santarangelo said.
It wasn’t necessary to evacuate the house, Santarangelo said, because the car was parked at the end of the driveway, which is slanted away from the house.
Santarangelo lauded the quick response of his department as well as that of the borough’s Department of Public Works.
For Santarangelo, the sinkhole might just be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
“I never ran into one that big,” he said.
Sporadically popping up — or actually down — sinkholes have long been a recurring problem in NEPA’s old coal country.
The gaping maw in Blakely is the latest of several over the past years, including one in Dunmore in June and another in Mayfield in January.
Wilkes-Barre government officials struggled since June when a massive sink hole opened up on its South Side, closing an entire block of Horton Street to traffic for five months.
The Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation is responsible for resolving problems such as mine fires, mine subsidence, dangerous highwalls, open shafts and portals, mining-impacted water supplies and other hazards which resulted from past coal mining (pre-1977) practices, according to a post on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania website.
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