DAISETTA, Texas – A massive sinkhole has opened in a rural area near the town of Daisetta, about 60 miles northeast of Houston.
Overhead footage Wednesday afternoon by KHOU-TV showed a zigzagging hole believed to be as long as two football fields.
There were no immediate reports of injuries. Officials are trying to determine what prompted the sinkhole near the Liberty County community.
KHOU reported that oilfield and farm equipment, including an 18-wheeler, a drilling platform and a tractor, had fallen into the hole.
Daisetta is a town of about 1,000.
Crews worked feverishly to pump hundreds of barrels of oils out of storage tanks before they fell into the hole.
"Right now we're not concerned about any kind of explosion or any kind of hazard," said Tom Branch a spokesman for Liberty County Emergency Management. "We are monitoring some other things around the area to make sure everyone's OK."
Utility crews had to cut a power line because the poles were falling into the sinkhole.
"There is some more that's falling in," said Hugh Bishop, a spokesman for the Liberty County Sheriff's Department. "The road that drives out into the oil field, there's more cracks showing up in that so we're just trying to take every precaution and get people back cause we don't know exactly what's going to happen with it."
Emergency crews from the Daisetta Fire Department were on the scene trying to figure out how to stop the sinkhole from growing. Experts from the Texas Railroad Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission Environmental Quality also were on the scene Wednesday afternoon.
FM 770, Daisetta's main thoroughfare, had to be shut down. School buses and other vehicles were diverted around the area.
Daisetta once was a booming oil town, and some are blaming the sinkhole on the collapse of an old salt dome that once sat atop oil brine and natural gas.
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