"US 285 south subject to sinkhole 1,000 feet ahead," motorists are warned.

But there is little other evidence that in southeastern New Mexico's oil country, a giant cavern sits beneath the earth, ready to swallow part of the highway and possibly a church, several businesses and a trailer park.

The cavern was formed over three decades as oil field service companies pumped fresh water into a salt layer more than 400 feet below the surface and extracted several million barrels of brine to help with drilling.

State regulators flagged it as a potential danger after concluding that it was similar to two wells northwest of Carlsbad that collapsed without warning last year.

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He is probably the most knowledgeable caver in all of the BLM. And a tireless speluncker to boot. He could move through a mudcrawl twice as ast as I ever could.. while mapping the bastard with an old beat-up Bruntin.

But, TurdBlossom, Clovis does not sit over the Delaware/ Permian Basins.. or even the Rustler Formation. The San Andres farther north and east is not salt or potash or even gypsum.. but limestone and limey siltstone.

The problem in Lubbock, Clovis, Canyon, Plainview, and all the way east to Miserable Wells is depletion of the Ogallalah Aquifer. You still get monumental "karst-like" collapses ... but they are due to depletion of water infill of voids within sands and gravels.. all Miocene or post-Miocene colluvium/alluvium.

So the "peri-oilpatch" will die of thirst.. but only ever suffer local sinkhole collapes. These actually began when I was a boy. I remember going out north of St. Vrain, toward Forrest, to look at a hole 100 feet across and 80 feet deep.. with knotted-up irrigation casing stucking up in the middle of it and a huge Allison engine and pump sorta floating in the air atop the pipe jumble In 1961. The farmer who owned that ex-well had been one of the first in Curry County to level his land and install roundy-round walking sprinklers. That collapse was big news. Now, a half-century later, similar disasters don't even make the Clovis News-Journal Farm page at all.

Wherever mineral weath lies below the surface, Texas and New Mexio farmers and drillers will rape the whole damned province to get at it. Mineral wealth in that part of the world is pretty much limited to potash, salt, and clean water.

Jackshep