Brooklyn Sinkhole Nearly Swallows Parked Car In Bay Ridge; Traffic Stops To A Halt

A massive sinkhole has opened up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, halting traffic and nearly swallowing a nearby parked car. The 20-foot-wide sinkhole opened up on 79^th street in Brooklyn, between 4h and 5^th Avenues. The sinkhole was reportedly 15 feet deep.

"It looks like all of Bay Ridge is falling in," resident Katie Hansen told PIX 11. "It's like the cookie crumbling."

Authorities believe the sinkhole was the result of faulty plumbing underneath the street.

"There's fairly clear evidence that we have a defect in the pipe," James Roberts of the New York City Dept. of Environmental Protection told NBC New York. "I don't know what the nature of the defect is, and we won't know until we're able to dig."

The sinkhole was close to swallowing a nearby car that Bay ridge resident Maddie Flood had just parked on the street, according to Yahoo! News.

"We're so blessed," Maddie Flood told 1010-WINS radio. "If we were five minutes later or anything, we could have been in the hole." The car was successfully recovered from the edge of the sinkhole.

While sinkholes are uncommon in New York City, this is the second sinkhole Bay Ridge has seen in 2012. On June 28, a sinkhole opened up on 92^nd street, resulting in 11 families being evacuated from their homes. The sinkhole was reported as 60-feet wide, and the hole still has not been fixed.

With the 92^nd street sinkhole still disrupting traffic over a month later, it's uncertain how long this new Brooklyn sinkhole will take to fix.