In Spain, you hear the expression, "¡Tierra, trágame!" which when suffering an embarrasing moment, means you want the earth to open up and swallow you. Well, that's what happened.

The victim hadn’t suffered some colossal embarassment and didn’t need to “disappear”, but this German lady did precisely that on Friday because the pavement opened up and she fell down the yawning sinkhole.

No, it didn’t happen in Germany but in a seaside town of Matalascañas in the province of Huelva. A mains-water pipe had burst beneath the pavement and carved out the ground beneath the street pavement.

A man saw what had happened and rushed to the lip of the hole, only to fall in himself when it collapsed further, which was not helpful for either.

It all ended well as both of them were rescued from the hole, full of swirling water and mud, and taken to the nearest Centro de Salud. The woman had a cut to her head and the man sore ribs.

However, the subsidence of the pavement did not come as a surprise to many residents in the area as they had complained about the uneven surface of the pavement and the pipes below the surface – how they knew what state the pipes below the surface were in, isn’t clear.

Perhaps somebody still had a set of those X-ray glasses that they used to advertise in the back of the War-Library comics from the 60s; you know, those adverts with promises of developing a physique like Charles Atlas’s?

Anyway, mere hours after the incident the hole was filled in with sand as a temporary measure, much to the dismay of residents who had wanted the problem sorted out once and for all and who imagined that it would remain like that for the rest of the year at least.

(News: Matalascañas, Almonte, Huelva, Andalucia)

Keywords: Sinkhole, German Woman, Burst Mains, Pavement collapse, Rescued

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