In 100-degree heat at about 4 in the afternoon, first on the scene was Levy County Commissioner Lilly Rooks. The call came in to the City of Cedar Key City Hall reporting that a “sinkhole” had appeared on Shiloah Road and SW 124 Court. As Shiloh Road is in the county, and not in the city perimeters, the call was referred immediately to Levy County. Rooks was quickly followed to the scene by the Levy County road crew who made the road safe for unsuspecting residents within an hour.

A neighbor living on Shiloh Road noticed the approximately 24-inch hole in the center of the road. To an approaching driver at a short distance, the hole looked like a puddle of matt black ink/paint/tar, leading that driver to think he could drive over it. Not so the case, however; that driver would have broken an axle, at the very least, very quickly.

The road crew painted a 10-foot square around the hole and sawed the square through the asphalt. The green John Deere Excavator 30SK knocked in the broken asphalt and excavated the breadth and depth of the hole beneath it. Immediately, the machine revealed that the cavity below the two-foot break in the pavement was approximately 10-feet in diameter, eight to 10 feet deep, and water-filled.

Waiting was a Levy County dump truck filled with recycled asphalt. The entire truckload was dumped into the hole, displacing the large amount of water; the excavator tamped it down into the cavity.  The crew was ready to pave over the hole before 5 pm that afternoon.

Rooks reported that the county had three such sinkholes reported last year, none of which was in this area. Yesterday’s sinkhole in the first in this area of Levy County.

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