Via the awesome gravestmor, who earlier alerted us to the movie trailer of the Mexican documentary feature, En El Hoyo, we learn that on February 23, “after rumbling for weeks, part of a poor Guatemala City neighborhood plummeted some 30 stories into the Earth.”


(Photograph from Reuters/STR New, illustration by Paul Hannan/National Geographic Digital Media.)

According to National Geographic News, “the reportedly 330-foot-deep (100-meter-deep) sinkhole swallowed about a dozen homes and is so far blamed in the deaths of three people—two teenagers, found floating in torrent of sewage, and their father, who was pulled from the chasm.”

While everyone knows who the real culprit of this terrestrial villainy is, Guatemalan officials nevertheless blame rainstorms and a ruptured sewer main for the sinkhole. “After the collapse, the seemingly bottomless depths gave off tremors, sounds of flowing water, and the scent of sewage,” we also learn.

It's at times like this when we wish there was a secret cabal of landscape architects, all possessing extraordinary design abilities and astounding planning skills: The League of Super Amazing Landscape Architect Friends.

Holed up in their subterranean lair designed, of course, by Barco, they wait, surveilling seismic monitors, Google Earth imagery, RSS news feeds, global hydrographs and ambient air sensors, until a new geological wound on the surface of the earth calls out for them.

When another giant sinkhole suddenly appears in another major city, a red light flashes immediately on one of their giant screens, sirens blaring. Within minutes, they are parachuting down towards the disaster zone. And mere seconds after they've landed, they already have sketched out the schematics for a fantastic vertical park, sure to draw thousands of tourists, mountain climbers and well-funded graduate students of garden history, who will come for exactly one hour to analyse the site and then spend the rest of their fellowship money whoring and boozing it up. The park won't erase the tragedy, obviously, but it might serve as a fitting memorial. Plus much tourist revenue will be generated.

Or when a mayor too powerful for everyone's good decides to build a multi-billion dollar stormwater deep tunnel, representatives from the league will rappel down City Hall, to the dumbstruck faces of aldermen, to offer inexpensive municipal stormwater management alternatives. Tax payers across the city will rejoice.

Is there an open-pit mine polluting your watershed? Have no fear, Julie Bargmann's protégé will come to the rescue.

Have you spotted another coastal development? Send an anonymous tip to the league and a Super Amazing Landscape Architect Friend or two will pay the developers a visit to point out the idiocy of their whole plan with powerpoint presentations.

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Tunnel-Digging as a Hobby