Located in Liberty County, Texas, about sixty miles northeast of Houston, Daisetta is a sleepy town with about a thousand residents. It has mostly been recognised, if at all, for perched above the Hull salt dome, a massive subterranean rock salt pillar that has attracted brine and oil drillers to the region since the early 1900s. The town's obscurity came to an abrupt end in the spring of 2008 when the ground beneath it collapsed, transforming a small pit into one of the biggest sinkholes ever discovered in the US. In just one day, what started out as a hole that was only twenty feet across grew into a churning crater that was hundreds of feet wide and deep enough to swallow telephone poles, cars, oil tanks and other equipment.
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