SinkholeOdds

Sinkhole risk in Freestone County, TX: No soluble rock mapped

No soluble rock mapped

No soluble bedrock mapped.

On soluble rock
under 1%
At or near the surface
under 1%
Buried under cover
0%

What this means before you buy

No soluble bedrock is mapped here, so natural sinkholes are unlikely. Collapses from broken pipes or old mines are a separate risk.

That works out to roughly 2 of Freestone County's 878 square miles on soluble rock, 2 of them with the rock at or near the surface. With about 20,645 residents (24 per square mile), much of the land is open, and the mapped rock may sit far from where people actually live. The figures come from 523 map points about 1.3 miles apart, so a pocket smaller than that can be missed or overstated.

Read next: why gypsum and salt move faster than limestone, and how these percentages are measured.

Counties around Freestone County

The nearest county rated sinkhole country is Baylor County, TX, about 222 miles northwest. 2 of the 6 closest counties land in the same band; the ground changes quickly around here.

What Freestone County is built on

The largest mapped soluble unit here is the upper Cretaceous rocks, undivided (limestone), Late Cretaceous in age, covering about under 1% of the county.

The county also lies over the Gulf Coast salt domes, a deep salt or gypsum basin. Deep beds rarely cause surface collapse on their own, but wells and mining into them have.

Against the rest of Texas

Freestone County ranks 147 of 254 in Texas for soluble rock at the surface, and sits above 50% of US counties on that measure.