The Ground Just Disappeared
One moment Christine Keilback was walking along her boulevard in Winnipeg — the next, she was chest-deep in a hole nobody knew existed.
Keilback recently told CBC's The National about the alarming experience of falling through the ground on her own street and finding herself stuck in a previously undiscovered void beneath the surface. The incident has raised serious questions about aging underground infrastructure in Canadian cities and what might be lurking beneath the streets we walk every day.
What Happened
Keilback was on her boulevard — the strip of city-owned land between the sidewalk and the street — when the ground suddenly collapsed under her weight. She fell through and became lodged in a hole that, according to officials, had not been documented or inspected.
The hole was not a sinkhole in the traditional geological sense, but rather an undiscovered cavity — the kind that can form when old pipes, drainage systems, or underground structures deteriorate over decades, leaving voids that aren't visible from the surface until they fail.
Keilback described the terrifying moment to The National, recounting how she had to be helped out of the gap by neighbours before emergency services arrived to assess the scene.
A City Infrastructure Wake-Up Call
Incidents like this one are a stark reminder of the hidden risks posed by aging urban infrastructure across Canada. Many Canadian cities — Winnipeg included — were built out rapidly in the mid-20th century, meaning that a significant portion of underground drainage, utility conduits, and buried structures are now 50 to 80 years old.
Surface-level inspections can't catch cavities that form quietly underground, and municipalities often only discover problem areas after a collapse like this one.
Winnipeg is hardly alone in facing this challenge. Cities from Halifax to Vancouver have dealt with sinkholes, boulevard collapses, and failed water mains opening up unexpected voids in residential neighbourhoods. In recent years, urban engineers have pushed for more proactive use of ground-penetrating radar and other subsurface scanning technologies to identify risks before someone falls in.
The Bigger Picture
Keilback's story resonates because it's the kind of thing most of us never think about — the ground beneath our feet, the infrastructure we take entirely for granted. The boulevard outside your house looks solid. It probably is. But across Canada's older urban neighbourhoods, there are voids and deteriorating structures that have never been mapped.
For municipalities facing tight budgets and competing infrastructure priorities, the challenge is enormous. Road resurfacing and pothole repairs are visible and politically popular. Proactive underground scanning is not — until something like this happens.
Keilback walked away physically unharmed, but the experience has left her and her neighbours thinking differently about their street.
"I just never expected the ground to open up like that," she told The National.
Neither does anyone. That's exactly the problem.
Source: CBC Top Stories / CBC The National. Watch Christine Keilback's full interview at CBC.ca.
