The roar was so loud that windows trembled. People ran out of their buildings, staring toward the highway, where thick gray smoke billowed and a cloud of dust rose into the air.

Within minutes, it became clear — part of the road had simply vanished. The asphalt that every morning carried buses, cars, and rushing commuters had collapsed, leaving a massive hole in the ground.

Fire trucks, police, and heavy machinery arrived almost instantly. Giant cranes lined the crater’s edge, rescue crews set up barricades, and reporters snapped photos nonstop.
The crowd stood in stunned silence — below yawned a black pit, several stories deep, smelling of earth and something… strange.

When the first engineers descended on safety cables, the air grew tense.
Their flashlights revealed chunks of concrete, twisted pipes, and mangled wiring.
Then one of the men suddenly shouted:

“Hey! Shine the light over here!”

The beam fell on something metallic and enormous — a rusted tank half-buried in the ground, as if part of an old underground facility.
At first, they thought it might be a water reservoir or a piece of an abandoned sewer system. But as they came closer, the air turned sharp and acidic — it burned the throat just to breathe.

“Back up! Now!” one of the engineers yelled, covering his face with his sleeve.

Under a layer of dirt, they uncovered a faded symbol — three black rays on a yellow background. The radiation warning sign. Below it, English words barely visible through the grime:
“Danger. Do not open.”

No one moved. Only the steady drip of water echoed through the crater.

Soon, environmental experts, hazmat teams, and military units arrived. Within hours, the truth came out: buried beneath the highway for decades had been an old chemical waste tank. It had been sealed sometime in the 1970s — no records, no warnings, no oversight. Just covered with dirt and forgotten.

Now the metal had corroded, the walls eaten through by rust. Groundwater had done the rest — and the soil above finally gave way.

When it was confirmed that part of the tank had ruptured, the entire district was cordoned off. Residents were ordered to stay indoors. Water supplies were shut down.

A heavy chemical smell hung in the air — sharp enough to sting the throat.

An old man living nearby quietly said,
“I worked here forty years ago. They used to whisper that something was buried under the road… but nobody believed it.”

Now, everyone did.

And the engineers standing at the edge of the crater stared down in silence —
because they all understood: if the collapse had happened in the daytime, when traffic was at its peak, the city wouldn’t just be talking about a disaster.
It would be living inside one.