Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/21/truck-opens-a-massive-sinkhole.html
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3 Likes
Very nice of the white car to pull alongside and force traffic into the hole.
30 Likes
If someone slows to a stop alongside a dangerous road hazard I think the proper etiquette is to stop behind them, not plow into the hazard at full speed.
30 Likes
I can relate. Last week someone dumped a pile of large rock in the highway - and I didn’t swerve enough in time and destroyed two tires 
It got 4 other people as well.
10 Likes
Wow. The timing of the truck as it passed over the hole and opened it up is almost cartoonish. How did the truck not fall in first?
5 Likes
I kind of think the headline is wrong. The Truck really didn’t do anything wrong, it’s not like it dropped a hole off the back of the truck or something.
The weight of the truck was the final straw for the pavement above the sinkhole, which let go. The white car saw something wrong and stopped. The grey car drove into the hole. The white car was kind of an asshole for leaving (if they did leave; they may have repositioned their car and went back to help.)
I mean, I can totally say “The grey car should have been looking where it was going and was totally negligent” but honestly, the hole may have looked like a shadow or something; or they may not have noticed the hole because they were watching the white car to see if it was going to pull into them or something.
Honestly, no, this is far enough away from normal that I just feel really bad for the person driving the grey car, hope they make a good recovery and they don’t get disfigured. It’s just a bad accident that no one was really at fault for.
12 Likes
Seriously?
If you see a car come to a sudden halt, maybe first assume that they see something that you don’t and slow down, instead of: “Look at this dumb idiot stopping for nothing.”
Worst case scenario, you wasted about 5 seconds of your day. Best case scenario, you do not literally break your face, as this woman did.
13 Likes
It fell off a truck.
An Acme truck.
23 Likes
Falling Nazis can also cause sinkholes
9 Likes
I mean, maybe in Brazil all drivers are expected to have ninja-like reflexes where sinkholes are concerned, but as I’m seeing it the driver of the white car didn’t have time to get all the way through the “what the f—” reaction before the other car slammed into it.
From first principles, sure, you shouldn’t slow down on an unimpeded roadway, lest you cause chaos for traffic behind you. But those rules also sort of assume that the roadway won’t spontaneously vanish out from underneath you.
14 Likes
When watching it, I got the feeling the grey car was behind the white car, and jumped lanes to go around the white car when it stopped. So I scrubbed back to see why I got that feeling, but I can’t tell. It just feels like the grey car was angled slightly as it came into frame. Maybe it’s just the curvature of the lens.
I could be entirely and absolutely wrong. I may just be used to people around here doing that.
Either way, that sucks and I’m glad the outcome wasn’t even worse.
5 Likes
That hole looked like a terrible bit of CGI. Come on, world, do better!
9 Likes
I saw a glimpse into another universe, briefly.
7 Likes
Just don’t drop a bag of holding into that portable hole.
4 Likes
Usually stopping like that just mean you are going to drop of a passenger or something like that, not that there is a big hole in the street. The second car should have seen the hole anyway, but may have been too busy trying to figure out if the first are was about to open a door as well as stopping.
First stopping to block the free lane and then moving along as soon as a car fall in seems way too deliberate too me. It probably wasn’t, but it looks bad.
3 Likes
It doesn’t look bad to me at all. It looks a lot like the driver being cautious because they have no idea whether than sinkhole extends under their lane as well.
If the first driver did anything stupid, it was pulling forward at all – they put themselves at risk.
2 Likes
Usually yes, but the answer to “Why the f@ck are the stopping?” turns out to be "“Pedestrian crossing the road,” often enough that care is warranted.
10 Likes
I wouldn’t assume they were a dumb idiot for stopping but I might assume they were pulling over to the side like that for a personal reason. I’d be more aware but who knows if I would notice what they had noticed?
At least this didn’t happen in Derweze, Turkmenistan.
1 Like
Truck opens a massive sinkhole and seconds later a car falls in
Read that as “Trump opens massive sinkhole and seconds later falls in”
6 Likes
