Having been here for nearly a decade, I’m well aware of some of the pitfalls of living in Pittsburgh. Some examples:

*Roads that lead nowhere.

*Motorists who slow down for no other reason than just because they’re driving through a tunnel.

*A distressingly large number of Steeler fans seem to live around here.

*No bratwurst to be found.

*Iron City beer.

*You get a whole municipality for each 100 residents!

Here’s another, one that I just became aware of in the last week or so: apparently, the ground can drop out from underneath you at any time. I became aware of this because the folks who run one of the high schools I cover noticed recently that their baseball field suddenly developed a sinkhole, four feet deep and covering the size of a football field.

We’re not talking about buildings being swallowed up by the pits of hell — yet — but we are talking about something that constitutes at least a sizeable hassle for the school district.

And we’re also talking about something that can completely creep you the fuck out. Last week I walked the sinkhole with the superintendent. We both found places, undiscovered by the district’s maintenance workers, where the ground was squishy; new cracks, forming pretty much as we stood there and watched.

The cause, of course, is the network of old, abandoned mines — in this case coal and clay mines — that snake around underneath this high school complex. When the mines closed a century ago, NO ONE FILLED THEM IN. This most current sinkhole sits right over a 40 by 20-foot room that sits 180 feet below the surface.

Umm, remember Newton? Gravity? If there’s a hole underneath your feet, eventually it’s going to get filled in.

There’s mines like this all over western Pennsylvania. It’s not completely unusual to see a news report about someone happily driving along when their SUV is swallowed up when a sinkhole opens up right in front of them. And if you’re living in an area where mining was a popular pastime, your chances of running into some kind of subsidence problem is that much greater.

The good news for the school district is that it’s not really being threatened at this point; years ago, the state paid $2 million to fill in the old mines underneath the buildings, so they should be pretty stable. But as far as I know, if there’s a mine, say, under my bathroom, it probably hasn’t been backfilled. I really don’t like rushing my time in the bathroom, but now …