You want to see some sinking buildings? Go visit Port St. Lucie in Florida, the ‘fastest growing city in the State.’
Why, I don’t know because it is built in Florida flat lands, has a high water table, is a hot, humid place in summer, too warm in the winter, laid out like a plate of spaghetti, is one of the few Florida Coastal cities with NO BEACH access, is directly across from the local nuclear plant, and large portions of it are built in natural, boggy flood zones.
General Development Corporation built most of it. They basically plowed everything down, did as little back filling as possible, built cheap, wood frame houses, covered them with a thin layer of cement stucco and sold them at outrageous prices. They plowed in a bunch of roads with conflicting numbered lots,and did not consider the tendency of the ground to become sponge-like and marshy during the yearly rainy season.
The place is rich in Florida muck, a black mass of soil consisting of rotting vegetation that reeks highly, is slimy and is GREAT fertilizer but is unstable when wet and dries out to almost a powder. (A 4 foot deep layer of the stuff, when exposed to the sun, can loose something like 2 1/2 feet of depth as it dries.)
A whole bunch of buildings, including medical ones, of multiple stories were hastily built on this stuff with a thin layer of fill over it to ‘hide’ it and, now, years later, they are sinking. Foundations are cracking, walls have developed splits and GDC has, after being sued several times by almost everyone anywhere they built in Florida, has left the area.
They leveled out a vast tract of land in the Florida Savannas, which is a swamp right on the ONLY ancient earthquake fault in the State. Much of the Savannas are under water, with bottomless holes leading into the underground water filled caverns of the State and the place actually has a tide. (It is now illegal to build on that zone.) After some of the heavy rains there, one dares NOT drive off of the paved roads onto the shoulders because your car will sink into the mud. Houses have been built up on something like 3 and 4 feet of fill and hover on these ridiculously tiny mounds and they are still settling and sinking some.
GDC ripped out nearly all of the native, ground firming trees and plants, left behind a bunch of weeds and planted these scrawny, spindly Oaks you see in shopping malls that never seem to grow, built a bunch of houses there and split. Now, the zone is a flood area – and does so frequently, though not much more than 6 inches of water. Plus, since it is nice and FLAT, it is a perfect target for the occasional tornado and since it is along the East Coast, not far from the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, it gets full benefit of the yearly hurricane winds – and no old growth trees to blunt the force.
Yet, the place attracts people like a rotting Possum on the roadside attracts flies. The Mets winter there in a huge stadium built on slightly better ground, where they parade around and ignore their fans.
A Club Med is there, a French run hotel resort, right on the banks of the St. Lucie River, though I don’t know why. In the summer, and all year long, the river is a muddy, brown flow and the place smells of rotting vegetation and the humidity in the hot rainy season gets something like a rain forest. The only thing you can do is splash about with the local alligators, or play golf on this big, wandering course that cuts through a lower middle class housing district. (The green is often so soggy that one squishes when one walks across it.)
They ought to call the place the ‘City that is Sinking,’ though GDC is no longer building there. Newer companies have that nasty task now and they are discovering another little funny thing. It seems that the independent contractors who hired on with GDC and built out there did not often want to truck their industrial waste back through the lonely miles of scrubland, so they dumped the shit any place, often burying it and building homes on top. Now it is getting into the water supply.
They had some big investigation there a few years back because too many kids in one area were developing cancer and people started mentioning all of the construction trash that was now starting to come to the surface. I don’t know how it came out. They don’t have anything for their kids to do, except go to school and do dope because they have to travel into the neighboring cities to get to the beach. They have few nightclubs but a lot of shopping plazas.
Now, the one cool thing I did notice about the ‘sinking city’ is that they have no minority zones or clusters. People of all colors live integrated all over the place. No Black section, no Asian, Indian or other zones. They do have a very low rate of local race related crime, which I find interesting.