Hakata street reopened after huge sinkhole filled in with sand, cement

I wish Glasgow council would fix pot holes that quickly... normally takes them a year to send a truck round with some sand and tarmac... few weeks later it's a hole again. This is truly amazing... like the collapsed road from 2011 that was repaired in two days.

The local road resurfacing is also very efficient here in Tokyo I find, done overnight rather than closing the road off during the daytime for weeks on end. Good work.

Well done Japan. Dunno any other nations which would have pulled it off.

Well said zenji, it may hurt some gaijins but that's the truth. Oz abc journos said the same this morning having a giggle with the before/after pics. Japan, take a bow.

Awesome ! Great the works decided were done as fast as possible. But silly to express having caused trouble if it was an unforeseeable accident. If not by the way, who is to blame? No one knows what happened after all exactly or did I read wrong ?. Was it a simple rupture of a main water pipe ? I hope they are sure of their technical solution else such type of soil issue could get worse to a higher order of magnitude. Zangyou hours for many for sure. Good money not even sure...but I truly hope those workers get praised.

Raise your glasses, a truly awesome achievement.

I drive through there everyday, can't believe how fast they fixed this. Someone got an extra bonus for sure.

Odd, the Guardian says it only took two days.

Truly a speedy fix. Great for all.

But I hesitate to applaud it as a mark of national quick determination. Bureaucracy and red tape is as hard headed and murky here as anywhere. As others mentioned view the heartache of Tohoku.

In this case the key determining factor was the location - a major inner city thoroughfare and the immediate danger posed by further collapse of connected infra-structure. Tall buildings with literally hanging foundations adjoined and threatened to collapse. The huge volume of water was going somewhere quickly and the worst place to go was the outside walls of the subway tunnel between the thick concrete and steel plates and the surrounding soil. If allowed to accumulate there, esp flowing, it could weaken the whole structure and undermine the whole tunnelling project.

The quickest and easiest and cheapest solution was to pump and fill pronto pronto! saving billions in the process. And of course utility functions(gas, elect.,water etc) were quickly restored because they were to be sealed over by the cement.

So all in all well done - but borne of a very,very costly necessity and not some miracle management.

@Zenji, note that this is a sinkhole in Hakata, which is entirely different from Japan's earthquake relief effort. Also, perhaps drop the feeling of entitlement maybe? Living in NZ has many benefits you simply can't get in Japan. Every country is different & has its good and bad points :)

Beautifully fixed ! So quickly too !

If that sinkhole had occurred in a major Canadian city, the repair work wouldn't start until they did a feasibility study to study doing a study to see if it would be better to wait until a solution for preventing sinkholes was done and then and only then until that study's conclusions were over ten years out of date so that they would have start the whole process again of doing a study and thus keep themselves permanently employed for life by the tax payers.

Japan is amazing in that way that they just get down to work when the work MUST be done.

Great work. Credit where due. Can't imagine another country where this could be handled better.

Lol, misunderstood the headline upon first reading (street reopend=another sinkhole).

Reports of another sink hole coming in. Police say they are looking into it.

With the amount of concrete poured on to coastlines and waterways in Japan, this is a tiny job!

Just wonder what happened to the subway construction underneath?

Here in Christchurch New Zealand we do not have the WORK ETHIC as you have in Japan. Our earthquake repairs and rebuild are a JOKE! Working 8 hour days, Two days off. So what takes you a day takes us a week. If you run short of work, come to New Zealand and bring your work ethic.

Now lets hope there is no other sinkhole somewhere else. unfortunately Japans future economically looks like one huge sinkhole

Unbelievably great!

That was fast indeed. This is how the issues should've been dealt with in Tohoku and Kumamoto. Now lets hope there is no other sinkhole somewhere else.

Amazing. This is why I like this country. Sorry for the 90000 citizens of Fukushima, but, this is very amazing. One week!