Japan’s sinkhole saga: Rescue efforts in chaos

YASHIO CITY: In a bizarre case of “sinkhole shenanigans”, rescue workers in Japan found themselves in quite a quagmire from Tuesday till Friday (today).

Rescue workers in Japan opened their eyes one fine morning, never expecting having to sink 16 feet underground to haul a live human from a sinkhole.

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In the Yashio City of Saitama prefecture, Japan, a truck driver accidentally fell into a sink hold that suddenly appear on Tuesday.

The sinkhole started as a modest 10 metres wide and 5 metres deep, before it decided to satiate its hunger by doubling in size.

It is now a whopping 20 meters wide, thanks to a ruptured sewage pipe that probably had a beef with the Japanese engineering and decided to punish unsuspecting innocent passers-by for it.

The 74-year-old driver was last heard responding to rescuers on Tuesday afternoon. Rather than starting yet another debate on the toxic Japanese work culture that forces even septuagenarians to work, media turned to merely reporting on the incident.

Since his last response, the truck driver had been buried under a pile of soil and debris, while emergency crew managed to fish out the truck bed.

The driver’s cabin, however, remains stubbornly stuck in the muck, as if in cahoots with the ruptured sewage pipe.

Rescue efforts faced quite some serious challenges. Road collapses have turned the area into a scene straight out of a disaster movie. Officials ordered over 200 households to evacuate, with residents also told to use less water.

Video footage available online shows a utility pole and a restaurant signboard taking a rather smelly dive into the expanding sinkhole.

The road later collapsed further, merging two sinkholes into one giant crater a la Moon’s surface.

To add to the crisis, the sinkhole had also swallowed a gas pipeline, as if its fury made it hungrier and hungrier. Officials were then worried about potential leaks to add to the list of worries.

Sinkholes are becoming a regular occurrence in the Land of the Rising Sun, where aging sewage infrastructure seems to be auditioning for a horror-disaster movie.

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The Japanese Sinkhole Saga may have gone on for days, but like everything, it had to end soon. After three agonising days, the truck driver was finally rescued, and so ends his story in collective humanity’s minds.

Stay tuned for the next saga in the making!