It wasn't quite this big, but you get the idea. (Photo: skitterphoto.com/Public Domain)
After owning his home for over 25 years, a resident in Edmonton, Alberta recently discovered that a simple depression in his back lawn was actually the mouth of a deep pit. As Global News reports, the shaft was only covered by a thin bit of sod.
For a long time, Brian Day didn’t think much of the small depression in the lawn near his back porch. But when he went to fill it in, thinking he could just pull up the grass and add a little soil, he discovered the deep pit.
Lowering a light down, he discovered that it was no natural sinkhole, as there were boards shoring up the walls of the shaft. The pit, it turns out, was an old water well created in 1928, according to Global News. It sank down some 88 feet. According to local records, the well had been tracked and reported, but was incorrectly placed just off of Day’s property in the official accounting.
Day will have to fill in the well himself. He says he stepped on the grass depression a couple of times just to test it out, but was luckily held up by nothing more than the intertwined roots of a healthy lawn.
Now, he says, the hole could be a cautionary tale for other local home owners.
“What we found last Sunday… that was a surprise,” Day told Global News.