Just in case a glass-bottom “skywalk” wrapped around a mountain more than 3,000 feet in the air isn’t scary enough, the brand-new walkway began cracking just two weeks after it opened.
The glass path that spans about 850 feet along the side of Yuntai Mountain in China’s Henan Province, was unveiled to the public on Sept. 20, according to People’s Daily Online. But Monday, a panicked group of tourists fled the path when someone dropped something — which some outlets report as a thermos and others as simply a “steel cup” — and caused one of the three glass panes that make up the walkway to crack.
Aerial footage of the walkway (story continues below):
"As I looked below me, I realized that the glass panel had cracked,” a man named Li Donghai posted on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, after the incident, according to Shanghaist. "I'm not sure what caused the crack, but there were people screaming that very moment and I yelled, 'It's shattered! It's really shattered!' before pushing aside all the people in front of me to make my escape."
The walkway in question is not the same structure as a glass-bottomed suspension bridge that recently opened at China’s Shiniuzhai National Geological Park, though some outlets have mistakenly conflated the two.
The cracks have “no impact on safety,” officials said in a statement translated by the New York Times, but the path is nevertheless closed for repairs.
However, according to the Times, Donghai took accused authorities of downplaying the damage, writing “It was not just a few cracks in the glass. The whole pane had shattered.”
Either way, we don’t know if we’d be too eager to get on the walkway anytime soon.
Contact the author of this article at Hilary.Hanson@huffingtonpost.com
