Police have taken the lead on a multi-agency emergency response after sinkholes opened under properties in two separate streets of Newcastle in the space of days.
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Emergency response crews on Fogo Street in Wallsend are monitoring a mine subsidence that has forced the closure of the Wallsend Diggers Sport Club and caused millions of dollars in damage to the bowling greens there.
Residents were evacuated and some 17 were still in temporary accommodation on Monday night.
Police said the ground appeared to be settling, or at least not falling any further, and that there had been as yet no structural damage to any homes in the area.
Meantime, a second sinkhole of considerable depth and width had opened under a home on Platt Street on Monday.
The fall had exposed underground pipes and undermined a portion of the house and driveway, but the state's Mines Subsidence authority has indicated that while it is investigating a number of issues across the city, the two incidents were unrelated.
The Wallsend Diggers Sport Club has borne the worst of the subsidence, with estimates running into the millions to fix damaged bowling greens, where the ground has fallen into a broad depression leading to a significant crack in the adjacent roadway.
"It is just devastating, it really effects everyone," the club's CEO John Hume said.
"It is not only the bowlers, and staff, but the general membership and the community as well.
"We had functions booked in which we have had to cancel and it has taken out all three greens which I dare say will cost $1 million per green to fix. We still haven't determined who is liable."
Questions were put to the state's Mine Subsidence Advisory regarding the extent of the subsidence on Fogo Street, and what remedial works were underway there, however the department was scant in its response.
It said it was aware of both incidents on Platt and Fogo streets, and that it was working with emergency services to assess the situation, however further comment was declined.
Residents on Fogo Street attributed the subsidence to decades of underground mining that had honeycombed the earth for years.
A former miner who worked on the Gretley Colliery, who has lived on Fogo Street for 30 years, said the suburb sat atop a massive underground lake of flooded voids such that, in his mining days, he could walk underground from the Colliery at Wallsend to Blackbutt Reserve without ever needing to surface.
The Gretley Colliery was the site of a 1996 mining disaster that killed four underground workers when their mining machine broke through a wall holding back an immense amount of water that had flooded the long-abandoned Young Wallsend Colliery.
A subsequent investigation found that the miners had been led into the operation by maps inaccurate by as many as 200 metres.
Graham Knight, who grew up at Wallsend but now lives with his wife, Catherine, at Elemore Vale was taking in the damage on Fogo Street Monday afternoon and said at the time of the disaster, mining was one of the biggest industries in the area.
He had several friends who worked on the mines and said the underground operations stretched beneath the suburbs.
On Lake Road, where Mrs Knights' daughter works at the Uniting Kombahla aged care facility, remedial works had been underway for some months to address a third subsidence beneath the facility.
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