Around 4:00 AM of June 5, a sudden shake and deafening crash awoke Zhang Naigen's family. Astonishingly, they found the foundation of their backroom had subsided; a pit with rolling water was formed. The pit gradually extended. At 8:00 AM, its diameter had reached six meters. It was so deep that a seven-meter-long bamboo stick could not reach its bottom.

A corner of a farmhouse’s foundation subsides in Yushan County, Jiangxi Province, in the early morning of June 5. The pit generated is about six or seven meters deep, covering 30 square meters. An expert is detecting the depth of the pit.

Li Yihui, head of the local villagers committee, told the China News Service that built on a hillside, Zhang's house is about 1.5 km away from the nearest river, 10 meters higher than the paddy field below. For 18 years, nothing had happened to the house before this subsidence, nor had the village experienced any trouble. After on-the-spot investigation, experts judged that this phenomenon may have some links with the limestone geological conditions.

At about 3:00 PM of May 12, two similar incidents happened: a 2 sq. km farmland in Luxi County subsided, and the same thing happened to a paddy field in Dongyuan Township, Shangli County. Because both occurred 30 minutes after Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan, fear and suspicion prevailed among the locals.

According to experts' analysis, land subsidence has nothing to do with the recent earthquake which hit Sichuan Province at 2: 28 PM on May 12; it is actually caused by the karst collapse.

Data shows that several land subsidence cases occurred in Jiangxi in recent years. A 90 sq. m paddy field subsided in Xinyu City in 1999, a paddy field of about 80 sq.m subsided in Shangli County in 2001, and a severe geological disaster struck Yudu County in 2004, causing the karst below to collapse, 2 km long and 1 km wide.

Experts point out that Jiangxi is an area which is easily, frequently and usually severely stricken by geological disasters. A research report issued by the province's Geological Environmental Inspection Station shows that the areas most vulnerable to subsidence in the province amount to some 8,290 sq. km. This report also confirms that land subsidence is related to underground mining and drainage.

(China.org.cn by Fan Junmei, June 6, 2008)