Potholes are enough to send motorists scuttling away or rile them if they have to cough up a lot to repair their vehicle after getting stuck in one.
What if the killer depressions are many times bigger? Say a prayer and run for your life as fast as you could.
One sharp-eyed traffic officer spotting a menacing crack at a busy intersection in Hangzhou city in China recently, saved the lives of motorists and prevented their vehicles from being damaged.
A closed-circuit TV which captured the whole incident, shows the quick-thinking man diverting traffic as he placed plastic cones to cordon off the area.
Posted by China’s Central TV station, the video clip shows that he was able to have a conservative estimate of the perimeter of possible damage and placed the indicators beyond the danger area,
Two minutes later, a small section collapsed from a fault line, followed soon after by a larger area around it.
The hole was big enough to swallow up a small bus.
Related: Massive sinkhole swallows a bus
One British motorist wasn’t so lucky in February when her car was sucked into a sinkhole. Sally Hall was trying to drive through an overflowing drain in Nottinghamshire when she got stuck, reported the BBC.
She was forced to climb to safety as water rushed in and flooded her car, dragging it deeper into the hole.
In March, a sinkhole didn’t pose a threat to the life of a Chinese fish farmer in Guangxi province but he had to count his losses after it swallowed some 25 tons of his fish, reported Chinese news portal Sina.
The hole was between 4 and 5m in diameter and some locals blamed the disaster on the work of a nearby rock quarry.
Also, last month, some Florida residents were forced to flee their caravans after a large sinkhole appeared near a mobile home park in Tarpon Springs.
Sinkhole repairs can cost much more than an arm and a leg.
A large crater that appeared in a B&B car park in north Staffordshire in Britain was fixed at a staggering cost of more than ￡2m (about S$4 million), reported the BBC.
chenj@sph.com.sg
Read also: Man and woman fall into sinkhole in a train station
China Central TV Station
