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Tokyo’s public infrastructure is widely considered to be one of the best in the world, with impeccably paved roads and sidewalks, perfectly operating energy grids, and clean drinking water, delivered with just the right amount of water pressure unless you really blast it up to high, in which case you’re basically guaranteed to flood your entire apartment with a biblical cascade of H20.

And, other than those types of user accidents, catastrophic power outages, water and gas leaks and other public works disasters are practically unheard of. But it looks like even Tokyo’s public works aren’t entirely foolproof, as a number of drivers, bystanders and local businesses learned when a water pipe burst near a street in the Takadanobaba District, flooding the street and plunging the area into (mild) chaos.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/607425971059191808

The incident apparently took place at what appears to be around 3pm on Sunday, June 7. Details of what exactly happened are a little fuzzy; whether the street flooded slowly over a number of minutes or hours, or whether steam and brown water just started erupting up out of the ground in great big gouts like the second coming of Gog and Magog isn’t clear.

Given the bizarre lack of almost any coverage of the accident by a major Japanese news source (we’d call this story dubious if it weren’t for the mountains of photos evidence), and judging from pictures of the scenes, it looks like only a small – maybe two block – segment of the road in question was affected. Still, that was enough to ruin plenty of people’s day, with some in the area Tweeting about ruined shoes and pants, cars hydroplaning, and people trapped in buildings. Well, like, first-world-problem, “That looks icky,” kind of trapped.

On the bright side, though, it’s good that the water pumping from the burst pipe was a nice, rich brown, the way sewer water is supposed to be (don’t think about that too much), and we can all rest assured that it wasn’t, like, ectoplasm or something.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/607427061142056960

Source: Naver Matome
Feature photo: Twitter