An Uber driver and the family he was transporting fell partway into a sinkhole in San Francisco on May 10.
Uber driver Jose Santana was waiting for the light to change at a busy intersection in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood that evening when the sinkhole opened up beneath his SUV.
“The car goes down right away, so I don’t know what’s happened,” Santana told local television station ABC7 News.
“It was terrifying. We felt that it might completely go down,” passenger Ashok Narayanan told the news station.
“We kind of thought it was a flat tire, and then we just saw all these people clicking videos and stuff, and the cops just came and they said just don’t move,” said another passenger, Radhika Achuthan. “It was, like, so shocking to see that big, big hole there.”
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission told ABC7 that the sinkhole was caused by a broken sewer line, which it expected would take one or two days to repair. The Los Angeles times reported that the sinkhole measured 12 feet long and nine feet deep.
At a time when Silicon Valley is groaning under the weight of bloated tech startups with high burn rates that can’t or won’t IPO, stuck in a unicorn fantasy that may very well be on the brink of collapse, it could be tempting to view this Uber-sinkhole incident as a metaphor.
Sometimes real life is even weirder.