A sinkhole opened up beneath a San Francisco street Tuesday night, partially swallowing an Uber driver’s vehicle with a family inside.
Jose Santana was chauffeuring the family in his Chevrolet SUV down Mission Street that evening when he felt the car immediately tilt, he told KGO-TV.
“The car go down right away, so I don’t know what happened,” Santana recalled.
One of the vehicle’s passengers, Radhika Achuthan, told the station that at first she thought the disruption was a flat tire.
“And then we saw all these people clicking videos and stuff and the cops just came and they said, that, ‘Just don’t move,’” Achuthan said.
Witness Von Bellows told KPIX-TV that that the SUV was balanced such that an uneven distribution of weight could have slid the car further into the hole, which the Los Angeles Times reported was nine feet deep.
Ashok Narayanan, another passenger in the SUV, called the moment “terrifying.”
“We just felt that it might completely go down,” he told KGO-TV.
A rescue team eventually pulled the car out of the hole using a rope woven around nearby parking meters and connected to a tow truck, according to KPIX-TV. No one was injured, police said.
As for the cause of the sinkhole, San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission pointed to a busted brick sewer main underneath the city’s street that dates back to 1875.
“Usually with sewers that old, age is likely the cause of the break,” spokesman Charles Sheehan told reporters, per the Times.
The sewer line is expected to take as many as two days to repair.
[h/t KGO-TV]
