The light bled red at Sixty-Seventh and Pacific, music throbbing through the speakers as Olivia Borsutzki relaxed her foot from the brake. In the passenger seat, her teammate Esra Kurban shifted, the two of them settling their gaze on the stretch of road unfurling beyond the windshield.
Beneath a low, cloud-clogged Omaha sky that Tuesday, the light flicked to green. From the first car in line, a woman stepped out into the churn of the intersection.
Odd.
Three cars back, Borsutzki tracked the woman’s path, the woman flickering in and out of view between the trunks and branches of the hardwood trees. It was enough to read as trouble — maybe a minor fender bender, maybe a flat tire.
The closer Borsutzki studied the scene, the less it resembled something ordinary. “We need to do something,” she signaled to Kurban, rolling through the light and turning left to park along the curb.
A rectangular slab of street had collapsed inward into a sinkhole. Two cars teetered at the jagged edge, their noses tipped skyward, almost frozen in the instant before a plunge. Beneath them, water tore through a broken pipe, its current grinding out a low roar — and suddenly, Borsutzki and Kurban’s drive home from practice no longer felt routine.
“On the news, it doesn’t look that scary, not that deep,” Borsutzki said. “But standing right in front of the hole is — it was scary.”
A sinkhole suddenly formed at an intersection Tuesday afternoon. (Courtesy of Olivia Borsutzki)
Borsutzki climbed out of the driver’s seat and sprinted toward the rupture in the road before crouching at the edge, a man pinned deep below crying out for help. He was tall — seemingly over 6 feet — wrestling the incline. Above him, the rim of pavement was unforgiving, stripped of any foothold, unlike the driver to his right who caught a seam and hauled himself out. With urgency in the man’s voice and hesitation in the air, Borsutzki acted.
“I wasn’t really thinking in that moment,” she said, “I was just like, I need to help this man who is stuck in a hole.”
The man in the 15-something-foot hole slipped from her grip. Seeking a second pair of hands, Borsutzki glanced up for help. Twenty feet away, another man had stepped out of his car and gone still — planted there, watching Borsutzki.
“I was like, ’Hey, come on. Help me get this dude out,’” Borsutzki said. “I was just mad. I cursed and screamed at people that just tried to record. They were laughing too, and I was stressed.”
The bystander ultimately joined Borsutzki. They hooked their hands around the man’s arms and at his belt, and inch by inch above the rushing water, the man scraped past the jagged edge before tipping over the lip and onto solid ground.
While they pulled, Kurban retreated a step and swept the scene — the slope of the asphalt, the cars idling too close to the weakened ground, the bystanders creeping forward for a clearer look.
“It’s not every day you see a hole on the road,” she said, adding that her parents — all the way in Istanbul — were “as shocked as me” at the “scary sight.”
WATCH: University of Nebraska-Omaha Public Safety security cameras show the moment two vehicles fell into a sinkhole on Tuesday — and how the drivers were able to get out.
Details: https://t.co/BI8L0WKoUN pic.twitter.com/PAX1Nb3xnX
— First Alert 6 (@WOWT6News) February 25, 2026
Police arrived within five minutes of the rescue. Officers surveyed the damage and didn’t require too much of Borsutzki and Kurban. The drivers — shaken but uninjured — stood off to the side, calling family. Borsutzki offered her car to take a breather, but they declined, still suspended between relief and disbelief.
As abruptly as it had cracked, the afternoon stitched itself back together for the two women. They drove back to their apartment, dropped a photo in the team group chat and recounted the collapse.
Only an hour later, the incident found a second life on social media. The clip surfaced on Borsutzki’s TikTok, swelling to 60,000 likes in its first hour, 150,000 the next and has since ballooned past 1.6 million likes. By nightfall, the scene — the hole, the cars, the two players leaning into the void — appeared on “every scroll” of their social media feeds.
“My dad called me the next day and was like, ‘You were in danger. It could be really bad for you,’” Borsutzki said of her parents, thousands of miles away in Germany. But at the fringe of the hollow, there was no room for hypotheticals. “I was like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t really thinking about it,’” she said.
Life resumed its rhythm — commutes, routes, routines — and the magnitude of the collapse began to blur. What lingers, they said, is the hush that gathered around the vehicles.
“Don’t be on your smartphones trying to record; help that person out. It could be you in that hole,” Borsutzki said.
“That’s why it’s so crazy for us, why we’re all over the news. We just helped, we did something big, but it’s nothing major. I feel like every person should do the same thing we’ve done.”