THE CALIFORNIA DELUGE : Couple Pull Motorist Out of Sinkhole

If Jeffrey Sawyer and his girlfriend, Mary Natani, had been able to sleep, a motorist might have died in the City of Industry.

“It was incredible because usually we are so dead tired at the end of the day (that) we collapse,” Natani said.

Instead the ground collapsed after heavy rain, eventually forming a 15-foot-deep sinkhole.

As the couple, attempting to battle insomnia, watched television at 2:10 a.m. Wednesday, they heard tires screech outside their condominium in the Whittier Woods complex.

When they ran outside, they discovered that a 1987 Oldsmobile Cutlass had fallen beneath the surface of the street into the sinkhole, which had grown to about 45 feet long and 27 feet wide by Wednesday afternoon.

“What we thought was that someone had gotten hit because the car that was next to him threw on his brakes, and we heard a screech,” Sawyer said.

Sawyer said he grabbed a ladder and lowered it to the dazed driver, who was “covered with sewage and blood.” The driver, Jose Maldonodo, 25, of La Puente, had managed to crawl out onto the roof of his car.

Moments after Sawyer assisted Maldonodo from the crater, an underground concrete telephone vault toppled onto the car, said Officer Alex Gonzalez of the California Highway Patrol.

“It seemed like it happened a second (after) Jeff had just pulled the guy out,” Natani said.

Maldonodo was taken to Queen of the Valley Hospital, where he was treated for rib fractures and cuts on his face and released, Gonzalez said.

A segment of sewer line broke away and eroded soil under the road, said Don Avila, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Department.

Officials were unable to immediately determine if the hole had formed before the car drove over it or whether the weight of the car collapsed the asphalt.

Still lodged in the chasm Wednesday afternoon, Maldonodo’s car was too deeply embedded to be visible from the Sawyers’ home.

“Can you believe he made it?” Natani said of the driver as she gazed from her doorway at workmen attempting to divert water around the sinkhole so that they could remove the car. “He sure was blessed.”

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How Sinkholes Happen

In the wake of the Southland storms, several sinkholes have appeared. One large hole opened up on a residential street in the City of Industry on Wednesday, swallowing up a car and forcing evacuation of a condominium complex.

THE CAUSE

1) Oversaturation of the ground loosens soil or rock.

2) A hole or series of holes are formed by the erosion of the underground materials.

3) The surface, usually a road, collapse into the hole.

WHAT IS IT: A saucer-shaped hole that occurs when soil or rock several inches below the surface erodes and causes the ground to collapse.

* Sinkholes often occur where limestone, marble, salt, or gypsum rock are present in the subsurface because they can be dissolved by water.

Source: U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory