Sinkhole closes commercial traffic into KTRI

[FORANE]

Runway 5/23 at KTRI Tri Cities Regional airport in East Tennessee closed due to sinkhole. The airport has another 4400 ft runway still open. Regional airline flights were diverted and all scheduled flights into KTRI cancelled for the near future.

Tri-Cities Airport runway closed due to sinkhole

The Tri-Cities Airport temporarily closed Runway 5/23 on Tuesday due to a sinkhole, according to a recent release.

timesnews.net

 

[Let'sgoflying!]

17’ deep is nothing to sniff at, jeez.
How come no photos online?

 

[midwestpa24]

It can happen. There is a lot of underground infrastructure on airports, electrical conduits, storm and sewer drains, etc. A failure of any of that can cause a void to open up. We had one once. It was first noticed as what appeared to be a flake of paint about 2 inches in diameter missing on a marking. The maintenance staff noticed it and looked closer. They realized it was actually a hole, and on shining a flashlight through it discovered a void under the asphalt 10 feet wide and 10 feet deep. The asphalt had bridged the gap, and fortunately wasn't directly under any centerline or wheel path. The next airplane or vehicle to drive over it would have found out the hard way.

This is one of the reasons I always say, never disregard a runway closure. Just because it looks ok from the cockpit, doesn't mean it is. If an airport takes the time to issue a NOTAM or put out the X's and barricades, its for a reason, and the NOTAM system doesn't allow an explanation.

 

[FORANE]

We've got numerous sinkholes and caverns around here. There's one sinkhole I drive by frequently that's less than 2 miles from my house. It's in the woods beside the road on someone's property. They placed orange cones around it so no one falls into it.

The only pic I could find of the KTRI sinkhole is from outside the fence far away. No hole is obvious. There's just a few trucks including a concrete truck and workers present. Guessing it's like @midwestpa24 described with only a small hole visible at the surface.

 

[Jim_R]

The only pic I could find of the KTRI sinkhole is from outside the fence far away. No hole is obvious. There's just a few trucks including a concrete truck and workers present.

You mean this one that was included with the article you linked above?


I hope they have found/fixed the root cause of the sinkhole (i.e, the underground water path that carried away all the soil/substructure) and aren't just blindly filling the hole with concrete.

 

[FORANE]

You mean this one that was included with the article you linked above?
View attachment 152637

I hope they have found/fixed the root cause of the sinkhole (i.e, the underground water path that carried away all the soil/substructure) and aren't just blindly filling the hole with concrete.

Take a look at how close Boone Lake is from KTRI: KTRI map

Boone Lake was lowered from 2014-2022 due to a sinkhole at the dam.
https://www.tva.com/newsroom/boone-dam-project

They had concrete trucks out filling the hole at the airport within one day. How much investigation into the root cause do you believe occurred?

 

[Albany Tom]

On the plus side, my estimating skills tell me that the local ground pressure of a fully loaded cement mixer is quite a bit higher than that of a Piper Cherokee, so the area around the sinkhole seems solid enough to me. I'll add that according to my drunk uncle, a cement mixer has a similar max weight as a regional jet. FWIW.

Not to suggest that the airport was testing the structural integrity of the remaining runway by sending a mixer out on it, but I have heard of worse plans.

 

[Jim_R]

Yeah, I'm not so worried about the state of the runway today as I am about how filling the hole might just mask the problem for a while, until it eventually pops up (or rather, falls out) somewhere else, potentially just a few dozen feet away.

 

[midwestpa24]

I know when it happened here, the runway was closed immediately. Fortunately we have another. By the end of the day a contractor came to survey. Next day the asphalt was cut back and what little was left under it was excavated away to reveal the 22 inch concrete storm sewer pipe that had a broken collar at a joint. By the end of the week the bad pipe was fixed, backfilled and compacted, and asphalt patch completed.