If you happened to be passing through Osaka’s Tsurunocho neighborhood on Wednesday morning and saw the large steel column shown in the video below, you might think the city was adding a new support pillar to the elevated road overhead. Hmmm…but it needs to be a little longer to reach the roadway, doesn’t it?
However, the issue isn’t that the cylinder is too short. It’s actually the exact length it’s supposed to be. No, the problem is that it’s in the wrong place, and the place it’s supposed to be is underground.
In fact, the cylinder, which is actually a pipe, initially was underground, but sometime during the early morning hours mysteriously rose up out of the ground to a height of roughly 13 meters (42.7 feet) above the surface of the street. It didn’t come up from a preexisting hole, either, as close-ups show that it burst through the pavement, surreally making the asphalt look like torn construction paper in the process.
The pipe is part of a public waterworks construction project. The city is in the process of installing an auxiliary pipe to collect excess rainwater, so as to prevent flooding if the capacity of existing drainage that channels into the sewer system is exceeded during severe storms. The pipe that burst up through the street is meant to connect the main and auxiliary pipes.
With the connecting pipe having a total length of 27 meters (or, as cultured civil engineers would measure it, 1.4 Unicorn Gundams), if it continued rising it could have struck the underside of the road above, and so traffic was shut down as fire crews filled the pipe with water, causing it to sink back towards the depths where it belongs. If the time-lapse video of the process shown above was too quick for your tastes, there’s also a six-and-a-half-hour version for hard-core pipe construction enthusiasts.
The reason why the pipe rose up is still unknown, and the Osaka municipal government is conducting an investigation into the matter. In the meantime, despite Osaka being very close to the city of Kyoto and Nintendo’s headquarters, please refrain from jumping Super Mario-style into any giant pipes you may come across in the city.
Source: TBS News Dig, Livedoor News/MBS via Jin
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