Don't let this cheery here-comes-the-sun facade the sky is pulling make you think, even for a second, that the universe has forgiven us. There's invisible rain damage hiding in all corners of L.A. County — and it's going to get you. And your little car, too.

Take the giant sinkhole that yawned its gaping jaw like it was nothin' around an unsuspecting sedan last night in South Whittier.

The 12-by-4-foot black hole might have sucked the car down to Hades' lair for good, if not for a team of L.A. County firefighters who rushed to the scene.

Two-hundred-fifty women and children…

… and some boyish types too, we suppose, though they'd surely rather have stuck around for some rad sci-fi sinkhole action, were evacuated at 6:30 p.m. to the nearby Loma Vista Elementary School. They anticlimactically returned home two-and-a-half hours later, though firefighters still guarded the area around the sinkhole.

Deputy Kevin Gavaghan of the Norwalk Sheriff's Station told City News Service last night that the recent rains could have played a part in creating the sinkhole. By this morning, officials also announced they had found a ruptured sewage line at the bottom of the abyss. Gross. We'll stick with blaming the weather.

The disaster occurred on the 13900 block of Coteau Drive in South Whittier. (There was also a rockslide up in the San Gabriel Mountains on Glendora Mountain Road, but no one cares. Still, another testament to the sleeping aftermath of the California rainpocalypse.)

An L.A. sheriff's sergeant told the Los Angeles Times: “A car was literally teetering on the edge of the hole and we saw there was a pipeline four feet under it. … The fear was that it was a gas line.”

Nope. turned out to just be a bunch of literal car-eating crap. Deputies also reported seeing running water way down there at the bottom of the sinkhole. Must be that damned weather!

Here's a video of an L.A. fire truck in an even cooler sinkhole from last year:

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