Nothing quite underscores the power of nature like watching a stand of trees, or a hotel, or an entire town get swallowed by mammoth sinkholes. Ironically, though, many recent examples of the phenomenon are not natural ones. They are manmade, and they can be every bit as devastating.

As far as manmade hazards go, sinkholes are fairly easy to create. Anything from a broken water pipe to injection mining can crack up the earth under the right conditions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It only takes two ingredients—soluble earth and water—to carve out a big hole.

“Think about all the changes that occur when water-drainage patterns are altered and new systems are developed,” writes geologist Randall Orndorff in a USGS news feature. “And when industrial and runoff-storage ponds are created, the resulting substantial weight of the new material can trigger an underground collapse of supporting material.”

That’s the likely cause of a 60-foot wide sinkhole that devoured a Florida resort villa near Disneyland last week.

“Once you start paving those parking lots and roads, putting up houses,” Orndorff told the New York Times, “all that water runs off and is collected in ditches and storm drains, and it has to go underground in, basically, a torrent.”

Those torrents more easily cut through Florida’s underlying limestone, which is easily dissolved. The state’s naturally sinkhole-prone geography has been exacerbated by development, giving the state a reputation for killer sinkholes.

In other cases, however, it’s not what we build on top, but what we take from beneath that causes collapse. A vivid example is Jining, China, which is situated above a Swiss-cheese topography of coal mines. Nearly eight square miles of the city each year are swallowed by sinkholes. The Jining Land Resource Bureau estimates that 5 million people will be forced to relocate because of them by 2090, according to a CNN report.

Since Jining depends on the coal industry, its residents have resigned themselves to making the most of the situation; they turn the holes, which often flood, into wetlands, recreational lakes, and water parks.

“We are nothing without the coal company,” coal company employee Meng Lingjun told CNN. “All we can do is keep mining and fixing the sinkholes.”

Bayou Corne, a Louisiana community with a similar problem, isn’t as sanguine about the 24-acre, 750-foot deep sinkhole that began engulfing the region last year and hasn’t stopped since. The gargantuan hole, which is thought to have been caused by the collapse of a brine cavern created by salt mining, has forced the ongoing evacuation of most the residents—about 350 people.

“The God of my understanding says, ‘As you sow, so shall you reap,’” Kenny Simoneaux, a Bayou Corne resident, told Mother Jones. “I'm so goddamn mad I could kill somebody.”

Although the ingestion of an entire town seems like the kind of defining event that might make people sit up and take notice, Bayou Corne has stayed largely under the radar. Even in Louisiana, a slew of regulation-heavy legislation spawned by the disaster did little to produce any kind of real protection and dearth of responsiveness from mining companies has raised the call for federal intervention.

“Our governor in the state of Louisiana wants to be perceived as business friendly,” Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who supports residents, told the Times-Picayune last month. “That is good, but you still have to obey the rules as set forth by the EPA in the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act because when you don't, accidents like this are going to happen.”

In the meantime, other communities across the nation face similar combinations of invasive industries and fragile geology—meaning the likelihood of manmade sinkholes is bound to rise as natural gas exploration, injection mining, and development increases.

“When you keep drilling over and over and over again, whether it's into bedrock or into salt caverns, at some point you have fractured the integrity of this underground structure enough that something is in danger of collapsing," Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist, told Mother Jones. “It's an inherently dangerous situation.”