Brooklyn Sinkhole Swallows Up Street, Nearly Eats Car

A Brooklyn sinkhole emerged in a city street Wednesday, creating a hole twenty feet deep and twenty feet wide that threatened to swallow cars whole.

The Brooklyn sinkhole emerged between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, New York Magazine reported. Several cars lined the collapsed portion of the street, with some hanging precariously near the edge. One car was especially close, hanging just over the lip of the hole, but it somehow managed not to fall in.

“We’re so blessed,” the car’s relieved owner told New York Magazine. “If we were five minutes later or anything, we could have been in the hole.”

This is not the first time a Brooklyn sinkhole has appeared. In fact, there was another one in the same neighborhood earlier in the summer, NBC New York reported.

Though the cause of the Brooklyn sinkhole wasn’t immediately known–leading reporters to speculate about unstable earth or crumbling infrastructure–the cause ended up being a little more ordinary.

Officials with the Department of Environmental Protection said it was created when a sewer main broke 20 feet beneath the street’s surface, NY1 reported. The main is more than 110 years old, they noted.

The sinkhole got the attention of local residents, who came to watch workers as they attended to the hole.

“It was like Jenga, had anything moved the car would have been in the hole, so it was teetering,” one witness told NY1.

Others took a harder stance, blaming city workers for creating the Brooklyn sinkhole.

“I just feel bad, I don’t think this should’ve happened. National Grid was working all weekend with jackhammers and I feel like they started something, you know these are old pipes,” another witness told NY1.

Crews said they expected to work through the weekend to fix the Brooklyn sinkhole. No injuries were reported.