It starts with a sinkhole. Caller on Elm Street reports a section of roadway approximately thirty feet in diameter has collapsed into a void. There's dust. There's a car alarm going off somewhere below grade. Routine enough — your jurisdiction sits on karst terrain and you've handled sinkholes before. You dispatch Public Works and a patrol unit for traffic control and move on.
Eighteen minutes later, a second sinkhole opens three blocks east. This one takes the First National Credit Union branch with it — the entire building, vault included, drops approximately forty feet into the earth. The branch manager calls from the parking lot. She was getting coffee across the street. She watched her workplace descend. She wants to know if the vault is insured for this.
A construction crew on 4th Street reports the road surface "folded" under their excavator. The excavator is gone. The operator climbed out just before the cab dropped. He says he could see lights at the bottom — not fire, not electrical sparks. "Like, infrastructure lights. Street lights. But underground." Your call-taker notes this in CAD and is unsure how to classify "subterranean street lighting."
Then a caller on the east side of town reports her duplex "went down like an elevator." She's standing in her yard. Her house is approximately thirty feet below her, mostly intact, and there are people down there. Not trapped people. People who appear to be moving her furniture into an adjacent structure. She would like them to stop. She would also like her house back.
Six sinkholes in ninety minutes, all in a rough grid pattern. Your patrol sergeant drives a perimeter and reports that every collapse site shows the same thing at the bottom: finished tunnel systems with paved surfaces, signage, and lighting. One of his deputies rappels into the third crater on a rope and radios up that he's standing on a sidewalk. There's a street sign. It reads "Elder Boulevard." A small person in a hard hat approaches him and hands him a pamphlet titled "Welcome to Subterranea — Residency Permits and Surface Integration FAQ." The deputy radios for guidance. You have none to offer.
The city engineer arrives on scene at Crater #2 and stares into the hole for a long time. He says, very quietly, "that's better infrastructure than ours." He then asks who poured the concrete. Nobody answers him.
Your watch commander contacts the county emergency management coordinator, who asks if this is an earthquake. It is not an earthquake. It is, apparently, an annexation. The coordinator asks you to repeat that. You repeat it. She says she's going to need to call you back.
Meanwhile, the Credit Union's corporate security team is demanding you dispatch officers to "recover the vault." You explain that the vault is forty feet underground in what appears to be a sovereign municipal jurisdiction with its own zoning. They ask what that means. You say you genuinely don't know.
The mayor's office calls. The mayor has been briefed and wants to know who's in charge down there. Your dispatcher says "we think there's a mayor." The surface mayor does not find this helpful.
Strip away the underground civilization and this is a cascading infrastructure failure — the same operational problem you'd face with progressive sinkholes over a water main system, sequential building collapses during a seismic event, or a series of mine subsidence failures in coal country. The ground is opening and you don't know where it stops.
The instinct is to respond to each hole individually. The better move is to recognize the pattern early and shift from reactive dispatch to perimeter-and-evacuate. If the collapses are on a grid, you can project where the next one might be and start clearing those blocks before the ground opens. That's a resource commitment that feels aggressive — evacuating people from buildings that haven't collapsed yet — but it beats pulling people out of rubble.
The nature code problem is real here too. "Sinkhole" works for the first one. By the fourth, you need a multi-event incident number that ties them together so everyone is working the same operational picture instead of six separate calls.
This sounds absurd until you reframe it: your officer is in an unfamiliar environment, alone, surrounded by an unknown number of people whose intentions are unclear, with limited radio contact and no backup path. That's not a comic book. That's a tunnel, a mine, a collapsed parking structure, a large-scale underground event where your responder went in before the situation was assessed.
The immediate concern is officer safety and communication. Can the radio reach from forty feet underground? If not, you've lost contact with your unit and that's your first problem. The second concern is getting them back to the surface before the situation changes. "Observe, do not engage, return to the surface and brief your sergeant" is a defensible instruction when you have no intelligence about what's down there.
The diplomatic angle is a red herring in the moment — that's a question for the city attorney's office, not for a patrol deputy in a crater. Your officer's job is to come back up safely with information. Everything else is above their pay grade and yours.
This is every major incident compressed into a more entertaining package. Stakeholders who are affected by the event but not in danger always compete for attention with the actual operational response. Corporate wants their vault. The homeowner wants her duplex. The mayor wants to brief the press. None of them are wrong to want those things. All of them are wrong to want them right now.
The comm center's job is triage, not customer service. "We are aware of your situation. It has been documented. Our current priority is life safety and preventing additional collapses. We will follow up when the scene is stabilized." That's the line for all three. You are not going to solve property recovery, jurisdictional questions, or political messaging from the dispatch console.
The harder version of this is when the stakeholder pressure comes from inside the building — your own command staff, your own elected officials, calling the comm center directly to demand updates or redirect resources. Having a PIO or liaison function absorb those calls is the play. If you don't have one, you're going to lose a dispatcher to phone management.
This is the planning gap that shows up in every truly novel incident. Your EOP has a section for earthquakes, a section for hazmat, a section for civil unrest. It does not have a section for "the ground is taking buildings and there are people down there who appear to be governing." But the EOP isn't useless — it's a framework, not a script. The closest analogy might be mine subsidence combined with a mass displacement event. You're not going to find a perfect plan. You're going to borrow pieces from three or four plans and improvise the rest.
The EM coordinator who asks if it's an earthquake is doing what everyone does with unfamiliar information — trying to fit it into a category they already have. When you tell her it's an involuntary annexation and she says she'll call back, that's the system absorbing new information. It takes time. Your job is to keep feeding accurate information up the chain even when nobody upstream knows what to do with it yet.
The most useful thing the comm center can do in this moment is build the common operating picture. How many sites, what's the perimeter, what's below each one, are there injuries, is the pattern still expanding? When someone upstream finally has authority to act, they'll need that picture. Build it now.
This is a fictional scenario. No underground civilizations are known to be annexing surface infrastructure at this time. The scenario is loosely inspired by the Marvel Comics character Mole Man, who has been conducting involuntary urban redevelopment since Fantastic Four #1 in 1961. The dispatch problems in this exercise — cascading structural collapses, novel event classification, officer safety in unknown environments, stakeholder management, and escalation without a plan — are real. The sidewalk forty feet below your jurisdiction is not. As far as we know.