© Rodolfo Gonzalez/Austin American-Statesman
A sinkhole swallowed the front end of a garbage truck in North Austin on Friday.
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.
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