Update: Employees of Clinton Collision, using a massive tow truck with a built-in crane, pulled the second car from the sinkhole about 11:30 a.m.

Waterville, N.Y. -- Diego Gonzalez couldn’t park in the back lot of the Schoolhouse Apartments Thursday night because of construction, so he took one of the three spots out front along Route 12.

“I went to sleep, and at 4 in the morning an officer knocked and my door and said ‘Your car is in a ditch,’” Gonzalez recalled.

It was it in a sinkhole, actually: Gonzalez’s car was one of two that slid down into the swirling waters as the ground gave way during torrential rains. A small creek that goes underground beneath Route 12 and in front of the apartment complex had torn away a 15-foot-deep chasm about 30 feet long by 20 feet wide. One nearby resident said the water poured over the road to a height of 2 feet, and nearby homes had to be evacuated.

The sinkhole exposed the stacked-stone culvert and an underground fuel storage tank, which residents said was probably used when the apartment building was a school in the Waterville School District.

Residents said the other car was pulled out earlier this morning, but at 10:30 a.m., Gonzalez’s Chevy Malibu was still stuck in the hole, nose down and wedged in by the rear bumper. During the night, the water had filled up the engine compartment and the front half of the interior, Gonzalez said, and the car is totaled.

Gonzalez just bought the car this summer, he said, and he hopes his insurance company will pay to replace it.

“I worked hard for that car,” he said.

A crane on a tow truck starts to pull a Chevy Malibu out of sinkhole in the Oneida County village of Waterville Friday morning. Flood waters caused caused the sinkhole. Glenn Coin | gcoin@syracuse.com - A crane on a tow truck starts to pull a Chevy Malibu out of sinkhole in the Oneida County village of Waterville Friday morning. Flood waters caused caused the sinkhole. Glenn Coin | gcoin@syracuse.com Glenn Coin | gcoin@syracuse.comGlenn Coin | gcoin@syracuse.com

Another resident of the complex, Joan, said she had parked her Subaru Impreza next to Gonzalez’s. She wanted to move it about 4 a.m., when the sinkhole started forming, but police wouldn’t let her because the ground was unstable, she said.

“A nice sheriff came along and said, ‘Give me your keys,’ and he moved it for me," said Joan, who declined to give her last name. “I told him I’d remember him in my will.”

Ryan, a manager of the apartment complex who also declined to give his last name, said no one was in the cars and there were no injuries.

The National Weather Service said 3 to 4 inches of rain fell in southern Oneida County during the storm, much of it in a 12-hour period overnight.

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