Catastrophic Wormhole Collapse in Western Transit Zone Leaves Dozens Missing, Prompts Global Safety Review

PORT SAHEL, CENTRAL AFRICAN ECONOMIC CORRIDOR (CAEC) — A catastrophic collapse of a commercial wormhole transport tunnel in the early hours of Tuesday morning has left at least 34 confirmed dead and dozens more missing, in what experts are calling the most severe wormspace incident in over a decade. The collapse occurred at 03:17 UTC at Port Sahel Terminal 6, an independently operated wormhole junction servicing freight and personnel connections between Kinshasa and Tianjin, China. The tunnel—designated W-881 “Equinox Line”—was handling high-load commercial traffic at the time, including three shipping convoys and a small executive transport. Officials from the Central African Economic Corridor Authority confirmed that the wormhole underwent a “violent destabilization event,” resulting in an uncontrolled collapse of the throat and partial disintegration of the outer curvature fields. Eye-witnesses described the incident as a “sonic implosion followed by a gravity snap.” --- “The sky folded in on itself.” “We were prepping a shipment for routing,” said Kaleb Onanga, a ground crew technician at Terminal 6. “Then it was like the sky folded in on itself. Half of Dock C was just… gone. No explosion. Just vanished.” The missing include 12 long-haul cargo operators, 6 station staff, and the full crew of a HorizonTech Type-2 personal transport vessel registered in Shanghai. Early sensor logs indicate a power fluctuation spike in the tunnel’s containment system, followed by uncontrolled dimensional torsion—a telltale sign of field failure caused by insufficient energy stabilization or misaligned vector tuning. --- Warnings Ignored? The Equinox Line, opened just three years ago under a private-public initiative with limited international oversight, had already drawn criticism from transit safety watchdogs. A 2088 audit by the Interspatial Transit Authority (ITA) flagged the route for “overcapacity stress” and “nonstandard power shunting during peak loads.” Despite this, CAEC officials continued to expand usage, citing economic necessity and a lack of redundancy in regional surface transport infrastructure. “This was a ticking bomb,” said Dr. Amandine Ross, a wormhole physicist at Geneva’s Center for Relativistic Transit. “You can't sustain high-throughput wormspace corridors on repurposed grid infrastructure. It’s like flying commercial jets through thunderstorms with broken wings.” --- No Black Box, No Closure Unlike aircraft, wormhole corridors do not use traditional black box systems. The exit node in Tianjin was offline for scheduled maintenance, leaving investigators without critical endpoint telemetry. Emergency crews have been dispatched, but there is little hope of recovery, as the collapse likely shredded any matter within the throat. The region is now under a Class-V Spacetime Containment Quarantine, and ripple scans are being conducted across adjacent corridors to ensure no secondary distortions. --- Global Reaction and Political Fallout In the wake of the disaster, the United Nations Subcommittee on Wormspace Transit (UNSWT) has called an emergency session to evaluate current wormhole regulation policies. Several G-9 nations, including Germany and Japan, have suspended all non-critical wormhole freight through unregulated regions, prompting widespread disruptions in the Global Supply Grid. “We’ve reached the edge of what ungoverned wormspace infrastructure can support,” said Ambassador Leiko Tan, Chair of UNSWT. “It’s time for enforceable global standards before another city falls through a hole in the sky.” --- The Victims Left Behind Families of the missing have begun gathering outside Port Sahel’s holding terminals, many still hoping for impossible news. One woman, holding a holo-frame of her son, a cargo operator on Convoy Gossamer-12, simply asked: > “Do they even know where they went?” For now, no one does. --- This is a developing story. Follow IWN for continuing updates on the Port Sahel Collapse and the global investigation into commercial wormhole safety.

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