A surveillance camera catches the moment an unsuspecting girl falls through a pavement while walking down a street in northern China. The pavement caved in under the teenager’s weight as soon as she stepped onto a section of the walkway. What followed was a dramatic rescue attempt by a passing taxi driver. His heroic actions were also filmed by close circuit television and on mobile phones.
The passing cab driver stopped immediately at the scene and climbed into the six-metre deep pit to help the girl. “I called out to her but she didn’t respond. After I shook her a little, she came to,” said Wang Wei, a taxi driver in the northern city of Xi’an.
She has a death grip on that cell phone..har!
Looks like China needs a bailout for some “Shovel-Ready” projects.
She fell into a pit of democracy and didn’t want to come out.
Taxi driver == Good Man.
What did she weigh, a 100lbs?
They just don’t make sidewalks like they used to!
Unregulated Capitalism, fraud, bribery, corruption: not a good foundation for sidewalks or for society.
We can “re-learn” a lot about ourselves with China showing the pit-falls about the limits of free market competition.
Anyone think the concrete walkway material is going to be tested to find out what caused the problem? How many other walkways are built with the same concrete?
Or did a few free market capitalists just learn how to make more money?
This is, or should be, a constant worry in New York city since all of the sidewalks are actually over open spaces which are used by the buildings for deliveries and storage, specially since it happens to some unsuspecting schmuck at least once a year.
Why is made amply clear when you walk over an underground space which is lit by swiss cheese holes through the sidewalk. (One fine example of this is the sidewalk on Prince Street in front of J Crew right next to the Apple store in SoHo.)
My wife and I met and used to occasionally go to an underground club*, literally underground, near 14th street & 9th avenue and you were able to walk under a wide stretch of 9th avenue, if you didn’t mind wearing a miner’s lamp and sharing your space with “track rabbits“.
*) My wife is not quite as into rap, punk, underground and grunge music as I was/am but now we’re into Nerdcore hip-hop (the absolute best example of which is M.C. Frontalot.)
Kudos to the taxi driver. Somebody send him a check.
What amazes me is the number of onlookers standing in the general area of the cave-in! They don’t seem to be cognizant of the fact that the whole area may be unstable… and no one is shooing them away for their own safety. This could have been much worse.
The sidewalk contractor must have added just a tad too much melamine to the concrete…
Least she had a phone if she had to call for help!
Chinese sidewalks FTW
My Chinese vacuum cleaner is jealous
This is why we tort reform sucks.
If you don’t hold companies and government accountably for shoddy work, they make everything sub-standard.
This was a setup for the web. What next?
Are those grey things supposed to be warning cones? How about putting up some caution tape or something…
The Chinese war on women is worse than the GOP!
And to think we want to outsource all our industry to these people