MONDAY PM UPDATE: Polk County officials have reopened Scott Lake Road today. The road, between Fitzgerald Road and Old Scott Lake Road, was closed to through traffic since last Friday while contractors repaired a sinkhole that opened near the road last week.

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LAKELAND — A large sinkhole has opened near Scott Lake in Lakeland.

The hole is at Scott Lake Road and Fitzgerald Road in the south part of the city.

Officials said at an afternoon news conference that the hole is about 75 feet wide. Crews were working to backfill the hole to stabilize it.

"A private enterprise hired by a property owner, drilling across the private drive, hit a pressurized pocket, causing the collapse. The property owners are on-site assessing the situation," the county said in an evening news release.

Experts say the crew was drilling a well and got to about 180 feet down before breaking through a hard layer that opened into a 300-foot void.

"This is a fairly high area of Florida," said University of South Florida engineering professor Nicholas Albergo. "I think it sits about 168 feet above sea level. So you can imagine that's a fair amount of weight that's occurring over our limestone, which can be very brittle, very cavernous."

Albergo said drilling into the open space underground could have caused a drop in water pressure, and anything previously being held up by the water would become dead weight.

"The amount of weight we're talking about could have been enough to actually cause a collapse or a break through that confining unite," he said. "It doesn't have to be very large at that point. A sinkhole will manifest itself quite quickly."

Three homes are in the area, but no structural damage has been reported. No evacuations have been ordered, but residents of the homes were told to be ready to leave if needed.

Fitzgerald Road was closed, and officials didn't have an estimate of when it would be reopened.

The area of the hole is very close to a spot where a sinkhole swallowed up portions of Scott Lake in 2006.

That hole took so much water out of the lake that neighbors could see the lake bottom.

Jack Hall has lived in the area since 1989 and described what happened in the 2006 incident.

“Just a sinkhole on the other side of the lake, it took the level down rapidly and it eventually plugged and came right back up,” he said.

Hall said he had his home reinforced for sinkholes but said Friday he’s not especially worried about the hole that has formed now.

“Having had a sinkhole claim on my own home, I’ve learned a lot about it,” he said. “And personally, I’m not that worried about it. This is a sinkhole area, and that’s the nature of the property.”

The sinkhole is at Scott Lake Road and Fitzgerald Road in the south part of the city.