Yet Another Sinkhole Opens Up on Third Ring Road

As has been the trend recently, Beijing's Third Ring Road has once again fallen victim to sinkholes, causing traffic chaos to the city's east downtown area.

The latest sinkholes are a pair of small-sized perforations that opened up Tuesday morning right after rush hour. Located on the Jingguangqiao stretch of the north-south road that flanks both sides of Line 10's Hujialou Station (south of Sanlitun), the sinkholes disrupted traffic on the busy thoroughfare, causing the rerouting of public transporation like busses #113, 350, 402, 405, and 671.

By 5pm, emergency repairs to the East Third Ring Road were completed. A preliminary investigation concluded that the crevice was caused by an accumulation of rainwater under the road.

The city has experienced a full crop of sinkholes this past year, some of them located here in the downtown core.

A week ago, a large sinkhole on Xie'erqi Boulevard in Haidian District swallowed a car (shown above), trapping three of its occupants for ten minutes. Earlier the same day, a massive sinkhole appeared on the North Third Ring Road at Lianxiangqiao, said to have been caused by a 3-meter-long crack in a drainage pipe. Two weeks before that, at the east end of Chaoyang, a 2-meter-wide sinkhole caused by underground rainwater accumulation opened up at Baiziwan South First Road.

And then there are the close calls. Last week saw city workers with the water department discovering a 1.5-meter-long crack in drainage pipe buried nine meters underground while on patrol in Xuezhiqiao East, Haidian.

Without repeating any of the well-known sinkholes that have already been listed, there have been a lot of them.

Last Halloween saw a 20-square-meter sinkhole open up at Wanquanhe Road (shown above), while a three-meter-wide sinkhole appeared the previous July near Shilipu Station on Line 6. And while we've recently told you about a car-swallowing sinkhole in Fengtai in September 2015, the same Beijing suburb also happened to have another car fall into a sinkhole earlier that summer (shown below). 2015 also saw the Third Ring Road get a sinkhole as well.

While we've openly suspected the cause behind all these sinkholes must be somehow related to Beijing literally sinking into the ground, some people have other ideas.

According to the Weibo account for the Beijing People's News, non-Beijing residents are responsible for causing this city-wide calamity. According to this account, the Chinese capital is unable to bear the strain of these outsiders who have been "exploiting the city's underground water", causing a financial burden of 773.64 billion yuan.

Well, we don't know about that. But, we do know that the city's sewage pipes and road infrastructure will be tested once again.

Images: Beijing Youth Report (weibo.com), NetEase (163.com), Beijing Focus (weibo.com), Weibo.com

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