Story By: John Feng, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report
Video Credit: AsiaWire
This is the moment more than 5,000 square feet of road collapses into a sinkhole and floods a metro station less than 12 hours before a new line was set to begin trial runs.
Dashcam footage shows the surface of Lvcuo Road, which is in the coastal city of Xiamen in East China’s Fujian Province, sinking below the ground and swallowing two cars at 9:52 pm local time on 12th December.
The city’s Emergency Management Office said the vehicles’ occupants were able to escape the sinkhole themselves, and so far no one has been reported injured.
The cave-in, however, caused a pipe burst, and video from the site of the collapse shows the district’s water supply gushing into the hole in the ground.
Flooding was subsequently reported in Lvcuo, an underground transfer station directly beneath the sinkhole, and muddy, calf-high water is seen seen filling up the platforms in eyewitness footage.
Xiamen Metro said emergency measures were put in place to provide passenger service on both ends of Line 1, which operated independently of each other and stopped before the Lvcuo interchange.
Commuters were then ferried by shuttle bus between the adjacent stations of Wushipu and Lianhua Intersection.
Full service was to be restored by 8:30am local time today (13th December), the transport company.
Video Credit: AsiaWire
Local utility provider Xiamen Water Group said the city’s supply had been affected by the water main burst, but the service has since been restored.
The Lvcuo Road sinkhole means the highly anticipated trial run of Line 2 of the Xiamen Metro – under construction since January 2015 – has now been put on hold.
Local residents were to be offered free rides on 13th and 14th December, with the 25-mile-long, 32-station underground line set for full commercial service on 15th December.
City officials said they were still investigating the precise cause of the sinkhole and did not say whether it was related to the metro line’s construction.
While announcing plans to trial Line 2, Xiamen Metro said on 28th November that experts with the China Academy of Transportation of Science, a research institute affiliated to the country’s transport ministry, had “high confidence” in the build quality and operational readiness of the new line.
News of the sinkhole has attracted more than 83 million impressions on China’s Twitter-like microblogging service Weibo at the time of writing.
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