On the 12th of February 2025, Channel News Asia headline reads: “Truck cabin found in Japan sinkhole search for driver”.

From the article:

Rescuers have been struggling to find the 74-year-old driver since the truck plunged into a chasm that appeared near Tokyo two weeks ago.

Later, the report continues:

“After experts analysed photos taken with a drone … they said there’s a cabin of a truck in the photos and they can’t rule out the possibility that what appears to be inside is a person,” local fire department official Tomonori Nakazawa told AFP.

But rescuers could not enter the sewer pipe where the truck cabin was spotted due to water flow and high levels of hydrogen sulphide gas, he said.

Hi, my name is Terence, and I’m your host for the Daily Monsoon, a podcast where I connect current events to matters of faith. Today, we look at the tail end of a disaster that started two weeks ago.

Unfortunately, this reminded me of another incident in Malaysia last year, when a 48-year-old woman was walking to a Hindu temple when the tiled floor she stepped on opened up under her feet. She fell in and was never found again.

In both cases, I was hoping they would rescue the person. Now, it seems in both cases, they can’t even retrieve the body.

As ghastly as it may be, try putting yourself in their shoes. One day, you are just minding your own business. You are not doing anything risky. No, you are not skydiving, you are not bungee-jumping, nothing of that sort for you. You are the sensible sort, just walking, just driving, as you have done so every ordinary day.

And then the ground opens up under you.

Nobody knows what happened to the two. But if I may, I hope as a mercy that the woman lost consciousness and never woke up from it. It would be terrible to be conscious and waiting for a rescue that never came in time.

Here is a gut-wrenching thought: I think the truck driver was conscious. He was, after all, in a truck, so he would not be knocked out or cut up when he fell. It would be a mercy if he fell and knocked his head in the truck and never woke up.

In the worst case scenario, and this is a scenario that I would never put to the grieving families, imagine if the person was in the depths of the earth, where no light shines and no sound of civilisation. Scared and confused and without hope.

If anyone dared to imagine it happening, anyone would describe it as hell.

The only consolation I can think of is that at least the person’s suffering in a sinkhole has ended.

My heart goes out to the families. May God grant them peace.

This is the Daily Monsoon; I’m Terence, your host, reflecting on life after reading the news.