A sinkhole opened up on a street in the southern Italian city of Naples on Wednesday morning, swallowing two cars and a tree.
The incident occurred around 05:00 am in the city’s Vamero district, according to Italian public broadcaster RAI.
One of the cars was parked and the other was in transit at the time of the incident. In what was described by local media as a miraculous escape, two army soldiers assisted the passengers out of the crater. Both suffered only minor injuries.
Gaetano Manfredi, the mayor of Naples, blamed the incident on «many years» of neglect of the city’s sewage system and maintained that a monitoring project was being implemented that would provide «preventative maintenance» to the system.
Authorities evacuated twenty families and closed three schools in the area as a precaution. They also opened an investigation in co-ordination with local police.
Sinkholes are not uncommon in Italy. In 2021, a 50-metre-wide hole swallowed three cars and cut power at the Ospedale del Mare in Naples.
