© Rodolfo Gonzalez/Austin American-Statesman
The truck's driver was fine — he found another truck and finished his route, a city official said — but Austin Water had to turn off the water in the immediate area for several hours while crews extracted the truck.
The cause was a 12-inch water main break, said Jill Mayfield, a spokeswoman for Austin Water.
"When water mains break, they run underneath the ground for a while, and then they're going to find the path of least resistance," she said.
The water from this break had flowed under the road and undercut its foundation, Mayfield said, weakening it enough for the heavy truck to break through.
A full block of West 49th Street was shut down between Woodview Avenue and Shoal Creek Boulevard on Friday morning while more than a dozen people worked to pull the truck out of the hole.
Workers hooked the truck to a tow vehicle, but then they had to get steel plates to make the ground safe enough for towing.
"We don't want to put another truck in the hole," Mayfield said.
By 11:30 a.m., Mayfield said, the truck was out, but the water outage was expected to last six to eight hours. It affects customers on 49th Street between Ramsey Avenue and Strauss Drive, she said.
Several neighborhood residents who came outside to see the sinkhole said they've had flooding issues and sinkholes for several years in a row on this street, which is near Shoal Creek.
It was worse last year, said Mia Savage, who lives a few houses away on a slight downhill slope from Friday's sinkhole. Last time, she said, water went straight across her back yard and even into the front yard.
© Rodolfo Gonzalez/Austin American-Statesman
One neighbor lived far enough away that she couldn't hear or see the sinkhole, but when her water pressure suddenly dropped, she walked down the street and the reason became obvious.
The garbage of the world falls into a sinkhole to be swallowed and to never return.