Two people fell into a hole that opened up in the sidewalk outside a Kitchener department store Monday.

It’s not clear what caused the hole to form outside the Sears store in Fairview Park Mall around 2 p.m.

Deanna Haddad was near the front of the store when she saw a woman try to walk into the building.

“As she stepped in closer, she fell into a hole,” she said.

“I don’t know exactly how deep the hole was, but she was up all the way up to her neck.”

As Haddad tells it, a store employee saw the incident and went outside to try and pull the woman out.

“As she opened the door, she too fell into the hole,” she said.

Both women were eventually able to get back onto solid ground.

Water then started gushing out of the hole, gushing into the mall’s parking lot and into the store itself. Witnesses say it took about half an hour for the water to be shut off.

In an email to CTV News, a spokesperson for Sears said that a remediation company had been brought in to clean up the damage and repaired the caved-in concrete.

With reporting by Max Wark