A big hole formed in Shenzhen Longgang District’s Henggang Road yesterday at around 9 pm, killing three people. The road collapse is under investigation.

Sinkholes are particularly deadly in Shenzhen, apparently. On March 26, surveillance cameras caught footage of a five-by-eight-meter sinkhole killing a man.

Yesterday’s sinkhole is reportedly 6 to 7 meters deep in diameter and 3 to 4 meters deep.

Authorities rushed to the scene after the accident to evacuate residents in the area and rescue those who were buried. One person was reportedly pulled out of the hole and sent to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

UPDATE, 5/22, 10:57 am: Via AFP:

The Shenzhen Longgang district government said on its verified page on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, that five people had died and added that it was investigating the incident.

The sinkhole formed just outside the Huamao Industrial Park in Shenzhen on Monday evening, at a time when many factory workers would have been changing shifts, according to the website of Beijing-based newspaper the Guangming Daily.

What a world we live in when the ground beneath our feet might open up any moment and suck us under. Yesterday afternoon, a five-by-eight-meter sinkhole that was reportedly four stories deep suddenly formed in a residential compound in Shenzhen. A very unlucky security guard, who happened to be walking past, never stood a chance. He died after efforts to revive him at the hospital failed.

Check out the video. It’s incredible. We’ve seen sinkholes and people fall through sidewalks before, but nothing quite like this.

We’ve seen streets swallow people and vehicles alike, and form a giant ass pattern, but a house?

Check.

In Guangzhou yesterday near Kangwang Road bus station in Liwan district, the ground underneath a construction site collapsed, pulling six shops into its Stygian depths. The first sinkhole appeared around 4 pm, and there was another one six hours later. There were no reported casualties, just one heck of a mess.

An underground pipeline explosion in Beihai, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region at 2 pm yesterday was captured on tape. A 100-meter stretch of road was destroyed, but the good news is no one died, which is certainly not something we’re always able to say about these road collapses. Authorities are investigating the cause of the accident.

Today in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, a big hole appeared on the intersection of Bingzhou Road and Bingzhou East Road, leaving an impression of two gigantic buttcheeks. Assphalt, if you will.

The potholes are seven to eight meters in diameter. Folks from the highway, fire, transportation, and gas departments were all called to the scene. Gas and water pipes both run beneath the road, and they’ve been turned off — too bad for the buildings nearby that, you know, need gas and water.

Still, I feel like the standard by which we should judge these road collapses remains whether someone was boiled alive. If not, it’s really could have been worse.

(via China News)

Here’s what it looks like to have a bus extracted from a sinkhole.

Yesterday morning, a passenger bus in Nanjing, Jiangsu province drove over a subway station under construction (specifically Line 3′s Daxinggong Station), and the road collapsed. The accident happend at the intersection of Taiping Road South and Zhongshan Road East.

Shanghai Daily reports that, “An initial investigation showed flow a quicksand underground could have triggered the accident, Nanjing Metro authority said. Sand was poured back to even the underground structure in emergency measures, authority said.”

No one was injured, which is good. Road cave-ins in China have been known to kill. Youku video for those in China after the jump. UPDATE, 12/3, 3:27 am: Car News China has found some high-quality pictures, too:

A neighborhood sinkhole in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province on Saturday afternoon caused a gas pipe to explode, sending up a huge column of fire that scorched several cars and forced hundreds to evacuate. After firefighters controlled the conflagration, the resulting pit in the road was 10 meters in diameter. Luckily, no one was hurt.

In the video above, a man and small child (let’s just assume father and son) stand at a distance and watch, all the way until there’s another explosion — at which point they scurry. It’s cute.

“The fire is so big!” says the child.

“Mmm. The fire is so big, isn’t it? Look, what a big fire, right?”

“So hot that I can’t breathe!”

“So hot that you can’t breathe, eh?”

[Explosion]

Father, in English: “C’mon c’mon c’mon.” “Hurry, hurry.”

Child asks something.

Father: “It must have exploded.”

“Ex-ploooded! …Let’s get away!”

“Get away, get away…”

Via Sina Weibo

Terrifying. Xinhua reports that “a section of Xiangjiang Road running near Xiangjiang River in Changsha caved in early Thursday, engulfing a passing vehicle and killing at least one person aboard. The cave-in, near the Poly International Plaza, created a 30-square-meter pit on the road.” I have nothing to add. Update, 7/6, 11:51 am: The vehicle had four passengers, two of whom were able to walk away from the scene; there’s now a video of the rescue effort, embedded after the jump.

(H/T Alicia)

Picture via Hubei Daily

Two weeks ago, Alicia wondered what it would be like to fall through a sinkhole. We now have an answer, thanks to a man in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, who last Thursday had the misfortune of sitting in a minibus just before it was engulfed by a hole opened out of the earth’s stygian depths:

“I thought it was an earthquake. The ground suddenly disappeared from underneath and there was this tremendous crack and a rumbling,” the driver, who had managed to scramble to safety, told police.

So the answer to our question: earthquake.

Dear Xi’an,

Your roads are not safe. A month ago, we introduced a video of a woman falling through a sidewalk, and while this provided many of us endless laughter, leading me to create a GIF, we were reminded, at the same time, that falling through the street is not normal. In fact, it can have horrifying consequences.

So, three days ago, when a burst water pipe caused one of your streets to suddenly collapse, caving in like, we imagine, the planet Vulcan from Star Trek, we naturally had questions. Fellow contributor Katie asked after the last snafu, “What is it with people falling through the sidewalk in China?” Now we wonder: how many people can fall through a hole that is 15 meters long, 10 meters wide and 6 meters deep? How many cars? What if there had been a massive traffic jam? How does one repair a road with a 150-square meter gap? All things to consider, methinks.

Of course, your job is difficult enough as it is. We don’t mean to pressure you. It’s not like 300 of your residents have had no access to running water in three days or anything. Carry on.

Yours sincerely,
Alicia

“What is it with people falling through the sidewalk in China?” asks Katie, who brought my attention to the above, which happened in Xi’an, Shaanxi province. Remember the woman in Beijing who was plunged into boiling water when the ground inexplicably gave out from under her feet? How can you not remember. Sidewalk. Walking. SUBMERGED BY SCALDING WATER. DISASTER. She would perish from her injuries, which we were told included her skin and flesh getting “almost separated.”

The girl in the above video — Youku version for those in China after the jump — fell about six meters, but fortunately not into flaying liquid. A nearby taxi driver who saw the thing unfold immediately tried to help, and eventually the girl was pulled out and declared OK. That’s the good news. The bad news: Now we have confirmation that sidewalks are unsafe. What next, falling anvils? How next will death conspire to end our mortal coils by the most indecorous devices?

Shanghaiist has this report from yesterday, and it’s shocking.

A woman in Beijing is now in critical condition, with 90% of her skin deeply burned after she fell into hot water beneath the pavement when the road suddenly collapsed, according to Beijing News.

Remember when mothers or nannies (or New York City) would tell you not to step on grates because they might collapse? Did they mention that you would plunge into hot water and be boiled alive? This seems infinitely scarier than Stephen King’s horror story in which a spider-clown creature lived underground and ate kids. Because this is reality.

The Shanghaiist post continues:

27-year-old white-collar worker Ms. Yang was returning to her office when the pavement suddenly caved in. The pipe beneath the pavement, which conveys hot water to a near-by building, happened to crack at the same time and water bursting out of the pipe almost submerged the victim.

Yang’s colleague, a woman surnamed Ma, who was walking with her when the accident happened, helped get her out together with a middle-aged male passerby. She told Beijing Times that by the time they managed to get Yang out, her skin and flesh were “almost separated.”

God. I can only compare this to video games to make it less real. Gears of War, for example. I think Gears of War 2, in which Dom and Fenix have to cross an abandoned factory to get to fuel tanks (or something), and the floor sometimes breaks underneath them — in exactly that perfect square pattern you see in the picture above — at which point they’re surrounded by spider-like creatures and devoured. Yeah, possibly that’s worse than getting trapped in a sinkhole of scalding water. Possibly.

The company responsible for the water pipe leakage, Wuhua Mansion, has offered 320,000 yuan toward the woman’s medical expenses. Judging by the article, though, they could be in for a lot more than 320K after they’re sued for millions for negligence.