If part of an interstate over the aquifer caves, can roads anywhere along the aquifer be trusted?
And which side of an I-70 crater, east or west, do I want to be on if and when it collapses? I have no idea how a highway cave-in created by a sinkhole over the Ogallala would be fixed. Might I end up stranded on one side of the crater or the other?
Because the Ogallala runs vertically through a number of states, trying to bypass a sink with another road that circumvents the aquifer could take travellers thousands of miles out of their way. Would truck and auto traffic across the sinkhole, and the Ogallala, simply stop? Can we even get our minds around the implications of this possibility?
Maybe we could drive vertical posts that would hold a bridge. The bridge would have to be anchored to stable land on each side of the aquifer, meaning that it might have to stretch many hundreds of miles. Feasible?
Or how about a floating bridge. Can a floating bridge be created with a water level that drops several feet a year?
A puzzle without a solution. At least one that I can think of.
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