Scott Lake, Lakeland: The Day the Lake Drained Into the Ground

On June 14, 2006, a sinkhole opened on the bottom of Scott Lake near Pier Point, on the lake's south shore. It took a boat ramp, a dock and a gazebo with it. Over the following weeks the lake — all 251 acres of it — drained through that hole into the limestone below.

The water went into the Floridan Aquifer, the underground reservoir that supplies most of Central Florida's drinking water. Fish stranded on drying mud, and the docks ended over dirt.

The peninsula sits on porous limestone, and rainwater filtering down through the soil is mildly acidic. Over thousands of years that water dissolves voids in the rock. When the roof of a void gives way, the surface above it collapses. Most Florida lakes — Scott Lake included — are old sinkhole basins that filled with water long ago and stayed full because sediment sealed the bottom.

Scott Lake had collapsed before, in geological time. The 2006 event was a reactivation, what hydrogeologists call a paleo-sinkhole reopening. A 2012 paper presented at an engineering conference described the Scott Lake collapse as part of the cycle by which lake basins form in the mantled karst uplands of Central Florida.

The lake bed sat largely empty for years. Property owners learned that a private lake is not insured the way a house is. There was no claim to file, and no agency responsible for putting the water back.

Sediment refilled the throat of the sinkhole — clay, sand and organic muck stirred up by storms and moved by slow groundwater. Year by year the void clogged. Rain that had been running straight through to the aquifer began to pool again. By 2013, The Ledger reported the lake was gradually refilling. By 2018, residents were marking its return: open water, wading birds, fish populations re-establishing, the shoreline back where the deeds put it.

Recovery took roughly a decade, and no one engineered it. Joe Curry, a spokesman for the Scott Lake Association, told The Ledger in 2013 that the anger of the early years had largely settled into acceptance. "It's an act of nature," he said, "just like that sinkhole over there in Seffner."

In June 2023 a new sinkhole opened off Scott Lake Road during a well-drilling operation, then reopened that September after heavy rain. Polk County officials called it active but stable.