One person was hospitalized after a sinkhole swallowed three cars in the South Deering neighborhood on the Southeast Side this morning.

Witnesses said the hole opened up around 5 a.m. at 9600 South Houston Avenue, quickly growing from about 20 feet to about 40 feet. First two cars slid in, then a third as the hole widened, witnesses said. A fourth vehicle was towed from the edge as it was about to fall inside, witnesses said.

Merko Krivokuca was driving his silver pickup truck to work when the hole opened up and he drove down into it. He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for “a couple of scratches,” according to his father, Peter Krivokuca.

Krivokuca stared in disbelief at the hole as cleanup crews hovered around the area.

Alejandro Filerio said he heard what sounded like a car crash early this morning. He looked out the window and saw a white car and a gold SUV across the street. Figuring it was just a minor accident, he went back to bed.

An hour and a half later, Filerio, 30, stepped onto his porch and saw the giant hole.

Ola Oni said she was about to leave for work at 5 a.m. but had not gotten in her car yet when it suddenly fell into the hole.

“It could have happened to me, I am lucky, I’m happy,” Oni said. “In this kind of neighborhood, I don’t think this should happen.”

She gestured toward the hole. “Look at this, this neighborhood is in danger.”

The sinkhole opened up after a water main broke, according to Tom LaPorte, spokesman for the Water Department.

The heavy rain could have contributed to the break of the cast iron pipe that dates back to 1915, he said. Officials are looking at the age of the main as well as weather conditions.

A sinkhole measuring nearly 85 meters wide and 15 meters deep engulfed three houses in a town outside Russia’s fifth-largest city Nizhny Novgorod as some residents of the small village were slumbering.

One of the houses in the town of Buturlino was completely demolshed. Residents managed to escape the building a few minutes before it literally collapsed like a house of cards on Wednesday night.

“I just barely left the house as everything around started to collapse,” Aleksey Ionychev told Russia’s Channel One.

“I looked and saw a poplar, 15 to 20 meters high, went under the ground and straight away I heard loud sounds of water running, like a waterfall, and then saw a 10 meters crater,” the man said. “It’s good that we are alive, but the house was new and everything we had, so to say, we lost. The house was not insured and of course no one cares about it.”  

Initial reports suggested people were injured in the incident. However, it was later confirmed that no one sustained traumatic harm. “Information about dead and injured that appeared in media is not true,”  the head of the local administration Nikolay Chichkov told Rossyiskaya Gazeta.

Thirty-three residents of nearby areas have been immediately evacuated. There were no people in one of the collapsed buildings, while the third damaged building was used for grain storage.

The Ionychev family reportedly moved to their relatives’ house, along with other residents.

According to Chichkov, the sinkhole not only demolished the three buildings, but also caused ruptures in electricity and gas utility lines. By the afternoon, gas utilities and power had been restored. The sinkhole remains cordoned off by emergency services.

The reasons behind the accident have not been made public so far. “There is a version that the sinkhole was caused by subterranean waters, which rose due to snow melting,” the regional head wrote on his blog.

Some experts also pointed to a railroad some 90 meters away from the place of the accident.  However, trains are still passing the scene, though they have been forced to slow down to 60 kph.

The town of Buturlino, with a population of 6,500, is some 120 kilometers southeast of the city of Nizhniy Novgorod in central Russia. According to the 2010 census, Nizhniy Novgorod is home to over 1,250,000 people.

 This one is definitely a downer, I’d be upset if this was me.

 Scary foamy hole.

 any Russian readers out there?

 not sure what happened, but it wasn’t good.

it’s like that tongue twister, red lorry yellow lorry…

A 25 year old man was killed by a sinkhole! CCTV cameras caught the whole thing!!!

A massive sinkhole opened up Wednesday in the southern city of Shenzhen, wreaking havoc at a residential compound and killing one.

According to the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, the sinkhole opened up at a construction site in Shenzhen’s Futian district at around 5:20 p.m. (5:20 a.m. ET). CCTV video from a nearby residential compound shows the ground in front of a tower shaking before suddenly opening up into a chasm in two separate places.

The sinkhole, reportedly 16.5 feet in diameter and four-floors deep, swallowed up a 25-year-old security guard working in the tower. Rescue workers were able to reach the guard and take him to a nearby hospital, but he died soon after.

Shenzhen authorities are still unsure why the collapse happened. Residents interviewed by the Southern Metropolis reported recently feeling multiple tremors in the area around the construction site.

Despite assurances from an expert that unaffected areas of the residential compound were safe, residents there were reportedly reluctant to go back into their homes and instead found alternative places to stay for the night.

This is not the first time that China’s Guangdong province has dealt with mysterious sinkholes. In January, a massive manhole suddenly opened up at a construction site in the city of Guangzhou, bringing down six buildings around it.

A sinkhole big enough to swallow a Volkswagen opened up on Lincoln Street next to the Bangor Daily News parking lot on Sunday.  Easy for them to cover eh? Also, someone left a VW beetle parked in view of the hole. This is just too good to be true!!!!

The hole is about three feet deep and eight feet long. Orange cones had been placed around the hole to warn motorists. Bangor Public Works Foreman Matthew Oakes said he had not yet seen the sinkhole, but said it would likely be addressed first thing on Monday.

Scottsdale officials warned residents to avoid the intersection of Pima and Pinnacle Peak roads in north Scottsdale after a water main broke and caused a sinkhole Wednesday.

The 30-inch irrigation line ruptured at about 10:30 p.m., forcing officials to restrict traffic through the intersection, said Annie DeChance, a spokeswoman for the city water department. DeChance said the rupture created a sinkhole and pieces of the road sunk into the ground.

City officials said they expect the restrictions to be in place for the next few days.

Current traffic restrictions and closures are affecting the following lanes:

Southbound Pima Road is restricted to one lane starting about 500 feet south of Happy Valley Road and will be diverted to westbound Pinnacle Peak Road.

Northbound Pima Road is restricted to one lane starting about 300 feet south of Pinnacle Peak Road and expands to three lanes after the intersection.

Eastbound Pinnacle Peak Road is closed to through traffic. Lanes are open for normal traffic east of the intersection.

Westbound Pinnacle Peak Road is closed to through traffic. Motorists are being diverted to northbound Pima Road.

No injuries were reported in the incident. A vehicle was damaged while driving through the area, DeChance said.

Sinkhole closes Adams Morgan street

Another sinkhole human attack!

This is Mark Mihal, the poor fellow who fell in:

Mark Mihal, from Creve Coeur, Mo., was playing Annbriar Golf Course, a place he frequents, when ground gave way to the 43-year-old, dropping him 18 feet into the middle of a dirt abyss.

“I was standing in the middle of the fairway,” Mihal told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday. “Then, all of a sudden, before I knew it, I was underground.”

Immediately Mihal said he thought back to a story of a man that was sleeping when ground gave way and he was never recovered, but after 20 minutes, some rope and help from the course’s general manager, he was pulled from the sinkhole and back on solid ground.

The story is just as crazy as it sounds. It was the first time something like this has ever happened at Annbriar Golf Course, a course that Mihal said he plays a lot because it’s always in good shape, but it seems he might be avoiding it in the future. Mihal said after the incident that it might be too strange for him to return to the course because of what happened on No. 14, but come on, you’re a golfer, we all have horror stories from golf courses! The difference is, most of our bad times end with the word “bogey,” not “bon voyage.”

I know that golfers normally get a rain check if the round gets washed away, but what’s the appropriate response for a man that nearly disappeared in the turf of your track? Free golf for life? His own putting green in his back yard? A miner’s helmet?

Lucky for everyone involved, Mihal suffered just a few bruises and a dislocated shoulder.

The township was fixing a smaller sinkhole near the sewer lines last week and, before she went to bed Saturday, she noticed her ceiling starting to separate from the wall at her home, 1502 Second St. She awoke at 4 a.m. to the sound of one of her three dogs barking and took them for a walk.

“When I came around the corner, I saw it,” she said. “A big hole opening up at the end of the driveway.”

The hole, which township officials estimated had reached 30 feet wide and 12 feet deep by noon, is part of a larger sinkhole that emerged in the aftermath of some sewer line work done this week in that neighborhood near the Wilson Avenue intersection.

Township officials evacuated Jenkins and her daughter, Ingeborg, from the home, and checked nearby homes. Officials say no other houses show signs of structural damage.

Township Manager Howard Kutzler, who was in the neighborhood early Sunday afternoon, said sinkholes can be dangerous, and people should not take them lightly.

“We caught this early,” Kutzler said. “Now, the repair work must be done.”

He said he expected engineers to arrive later Sunday or Monday to survey the size of the sinkhole.

Ron Ford, assistant chief at the Bethlehem Township Volunteer Fire Department, estimated the sinkhole could be as big as a half-block.

Sinkholes grabbed national headlines two weeks ago when a 37-year-old Florida man died after a sinkhole opened up beneath his house and swallowed the bedroom in which he was sleeping.

Locally, a sinkhole discovered last July beneath an Allentown home in the 800 block of North Fifth Street forced the evacuation of a block of row homes. In December 2011, a sinkhole engulfed a half-block of homes on North 10^th Street, damaging homes and threatening the nearby cemetery.

Limestone is prominent in the Lehigh Valley. Limestone is prone to sinkholes because of its solubility when water comes in contact with it. The southern half of Bethlehem Township contains a lot of limestone, township officials say.

Ford said Sunday’s sinkhole is the first major sinkhole he is aware of in that neighborhood.

Earlier this week, township officials had a sewer line fail in Jenkins neighborhood. Township crews dug up a sewer line in the neighborhood and fixed two smaller sinkholes that had opened up.

On Sunday morning, the township shut down the pump house and trucked the sewage to the treatment plant, off Shimersville Road in Bethlehem. The sewer line that runs through Jenkins’ neighborhood can carry up to a million gallons of sewage a day. Officials say it was installed in the 1970s.

“It’s not a small line,” Ford said.

He said township officials are monitoring the neighborhood to ensure gas from the sewer lines does not back up into the homes.

Jenkins’ house was blocked off with yellow caution tape. Neighbors in the middle-class neighborhood of bi-levels and ranch homes milled outside in the warm winter weather to watch crews work.

Karen Leschinsky, who lives next door to Jenkins, has lived in the neighborhood for 25 years and never saw a sinkhole as large as the one that began forming Sunday.