By Kim Wilmath, Times Staff Writer
Saturday, December 11, 2010
This sinkhole in Dover appeared in early January, when the area experienced an extended period of cold weather and farmers used groundwater to protect their crops.
PLANT CITY — Edgar Mansila looks next door and prays.
There's just an empty patch of land there now, an unremarkable gap in a row of little mobile homes. But when Mansila thinks about what happened at the lot last year, when the temperatures dipped and farmers turned on their sprinklers and a sinkhole swallowed his neighbor's home at the Oakbrook Mobile Home Park, there's only one thing to say.
"Jesus," he mutters, "help us."
With temperatures flirting with 30 degrees even before Christmas, Mansila and other east Hillsborough residents fear a repeat of last year's disaster: dozens of sinkholes and hundreds of dry wells caused by a record stretch of ...