Man on smoke break falls into sinkhole, hit by vending machine

2022-09-17 01:00:29 By : Mr. TOM WONG

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Smoking really is bad for your health.

A Turkish man’s cigarette break nearly turned deadly after he got swallowed by a nearly 20-foot-deep sinkhole — and then hit with a falling vending machine — while lighting up outside. A video of the calamitous chain of events is currently blowing up online.

“All of a sudden, the ground I stepped on collapsed under my feet,” Omer Kacagan told Newsflash. The groundbreaking event occurred on Feb. 4 in Istanbul while the shopkeeper was “talking on the phone” in front of his business when no customers were around.

The accompanying footage starts off innocuously enough with the unsuspecting business owner nonchalantly chatting on his cell and smoking a cigarette. However, disaster strikes when he wanders past a pair of vending machines, and the earth suddenly opens up beneath his feet and he tumbles down like a scene out of a disaster movie.

Then, like an apocalyptic exclamation point, one of the automated snack dispensers follows him into the hole, showering the victim with cans.

“I fell about six meters,” he recalled.

Despite the disastrous double whammy, Kacagan was reportedly unharmed aside from a few minor injuries. Afterward, “fellow shopkeepers and bystanders reported the incident to the necessary authorities, and I was rescued by firefighters around 25 minutes later,” he said.

Officials are currently investigating what caused the impromptu chasm, which some sources attributed to the fact that there used to be a well in the area.

This isn’t the first time someone has fallen prey to a Swiss cheese landscape. In a similar sinkhole incident closer to home, two cars were engulfed by a capacious crater that surfaced on NYC’s Upper East Side neighborhood in June.