Sinkhole swallows several cars at south Edmonton dealership
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| It was quite the spectacle at a local car dealership: A sinkhole opened up in the parking lot of Infiniti South Edmonton, swallowing several vehicles at the lot just off Gateway Blvd. and Ellerslie Road on Tuesday. Morgan Black has more on what happened. |
Four vehicles were seen sinking into the parking lot of a south Edmonton car dealership Tuesday morning.
The cars were either fully or partially in the sinkhole outside Infiniti South Edmonton just off Gateway Blvd. and south of Ellerslie Road.
“I walked in this morning… I saw the cars sunken in,” said Lucky Uppal, who works next door at Mercedes-Benz Heritage Valley.
“I didn’t know what it was (so I) go into the show room and looked on the camera, and at around 12 o’clock last night, you could see them slowly collapsing into the ground.
“It still surprised me to see,” Uppal said.
A section of parking lot was cordoned off by orange pylons outside the service area entrance.
The general manager of the dealership declined to comment.
READ MORE: 61 Avenue intersection’s closure due to massive sinkhole extended to end of July
Uppal said it’s lucky the sinkhole emerged overnight and not during the day when there are people around.
The team at the Mercedes dealership was a little concerned so it called the city and a structural engineer to check things out.
“We have a basement so we’re super happy that nothing happened to us,” he said. “It could be really expensive then, who knows. We have about 100 cars downstairs.”
Cliffs Towing was on site at 11:30 a.m.
Dale Jackson, who’s worked with the towing and recovery company for more than 50 years, said he was pretty shocked when he first arrived at the parking lot.
“It looks like a sinkhole. There’s obviously some water that escaped underneath the ground and too much weight,” Jackson explained.
It’s rare to see this size of a sinkhole in a parking lot in Edmonton, he said.
“It’s a big one. Luckily there’s only four in there and not a whole parking lot.
“It’s usually out on the road where water escapes underneath, pipes break, stuff like that. But in a dealership? No… This is very rare.”
He said two of the cars are new, one is used and one is a customer’s car.
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The Cliffs crew planned to use special equipment to remove the cars from the side of the sinkhole.
“That machine over there is a 50-tonne rotator. It’ll swing out, put the spreader bars on and lift them out.”
Jackson estimates it’s about a three-hour job.
He said the vehicles only appear to have sustained cosmetic damage and should be repairable.
EPCOR was also on scene to assess the situation.
The company wasn’t notified about the sinkhole but has reached out to the dealership and dispatched a crew to see if they can “assist the businesses with next steps.”
“Initial assessment is that this hole is on private property and there is no EPCOR-owned infrastructure under the area,” an EPCOR spokesperson told.
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