Sinkholes in St. Lucie County: none confirmed in the state’s record

Florida keeps a statewide record of places where the ground has been reported sinking. As of September 2026 it held 4,417 reports. Three are in St. Lucie County, and none of the three has been confirmed as a sinkhole. Hillsborough County has 615. This page goes through the county’s three reports, what the state’s record can and cannot tell you, and why the ground under St. Lucie County behaves differently from the sinkhole country around Tampa and Ocala.

What the state’s record is

The Florida Geological Survey, part of the state Department of Environmental Protection, keeps a database of subsidence incident reports. Each entry is a report that the ground sank somewhere, made by whoever called it in: a resident, a county office, an emergency call. The Survey says plainly that most entries have never been checked in the field. Until a geologist verifies one as a sinkhole, it is recorded as a subsidence incident.

Of the 4,417 reports statewide, 103 are marked as verified sinkholes and 93 as checked and found not to be. Nearly all the rest are unverified.

The three St. Lucie County reports

September 12, 2011, Fort Pierce. Reported through the county’s 911 service: a hole about 5 feet across and 7 feet deep that closed a road for a time. Unverified.

January 9, 2014, South Indian River Drive. The county reported ground subsidence that closed the road. A county representative said the feature was a washout. Unverified.

November 11, 2025. A resident reported ground sinking under a house, with a cracked outside wall. The Survey’s note on the report reads: “This area is not conducive to sinkhole formation. The subsidence could be caused by sediment due to infrastructure failure.” Unverified.

St. Lucie County against the sinkhole counties

Five counties, Hillsborough, Marion, Citrus, Pasco and Hernando, hold nearly half of the state’s reports between them. The three Treasure Coast counties hold twelve: St. Lucie 3, Martin 3 and Indian River 6. None of the twelve is a verified sinkhole, and two of them, one in Martin and one in Indian River, were checked and found not to be.

A count of reports is not a count of sinkholes. It depends on who calls one in, and most reports were never checked. The gap is still wide: about two hundred reports in Hillsborough County for every one in St. Lucie. Our guide to Florida’s most sinkhole-prone areas explains why the reports gather where they do.

Why the ground here is different

Florida’s sinkholes open where limestone that dissolves lies close to the surface, or where the clay above it is thin or broken. Our page on why Florida has so many sinkholes explains how. Under Fort Pierce the limestone is far down. The deep wells drilled there in 1905 and 1912 reached it at about 670 to 750 feet, under hundreds of feet of sand, shell and clay, and the Fort Pierce artesian wells has the driller’s log. The Survey’s note on the 2025 report reaches the same conclusion for that spot: the area is not conducive to sinkhole formation.

If the ground sinks on your property

Ground can sink for reasons that have nothing to do with limestone. Two of the county’s three reports point that way: a washout under a road, as the county said in 2014, and sediment lost to a failure in buried infrastructure, as the Survey suggested in 2025. Our Florida sinkhole guide covers the warning signs and what to do.

Sources

The incident reports are from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida Geological Survey, Florida Subsidence Incident Reports, the state’s open data, downloaded September 27, 2026. The depth to limestone at Fort Pierce is from the 1913 state and federal surveys cited on our Fort Pierce artesian wells page.