(Click here to get back to the Quirky Tales intro page.)
Quirky tale #10:
Sinking an unexpected hole
It was an encounter too close for comfort. Here we have evidence from Nov. 12, 1957, of a little-known and quickly hushed-up incident in which an asteroid entered the earth’s atmosphere and crashed onto a boulevard on the north side of Queen Anne. It left a massive hole before rolling down a wooded slope to Aurora Avenue North.
Hole-y mole-y! It’s April Fool on you if you believed that the crater in the aerial photo was caused by an asteroid hitting Queen Anne. The massive sinkhole, actually in the 1600 block of Ravenna Boulevard, truly appeared on that 1957 date, but it was the result of a broken storm sewer that carried away sandy soil and caused pavement to collapse. The crater, 100 feet long, 66 feet wide and 40 feet deep, frightened householders and threatened their homes, but amazingly no one was injured. Residents of the contiguous homes — still standing today — relocated for about a month while the city filled the pit with gravel and repaved the street.