HANGZHOU: Saturday, 3:20 pm: Jin Guofei is on patrol on his motorcycle. He hears a deafening¹ noise. But before he can understand what is happening, he finds himself in a huge crater².

Water begins flowing into the crater. He recovers and looks around to see some people in vehicles in a state of shock.

Without wasting a second, he tells them to run for their lives. When some of them say they want to take their belongings³ from the vehicles, he tells them that their lives are more important and they should leave immediately.

Twenty-seven people are saved.

He is the last to leave the crater but doesn't go home. He stays near the accident site till 8 pm to help maintain order. Jin leaves only after feeling a pain in his waist, which he had bruised⁴ in the fall.

But ask the 30-year-old traffic policeman about the subway tunnel collapse⁵, and he does not think what he did was heroic.

"It was nothing, really. My colleagues would have done the same thing ," he says. "I had no time to think of other things except getting those people out (of the crater) as soon as possible, even though I had panicked myself."

The local people, especially the 27 who he helped save, however, say they are indebted to him. Without him on the scene so many people could not have been saved, they say.

His colleagues and seniors, too, praise his work. "Jin has always worked with enthusiasm I've never seen him feeling tired. Besides, he is calm and resourceful during an emergency," says Qu Jinghao, Jin's supervisor⁶ in the Xiaoshan district traffic police team.

"I was patrolling around the subway construction site when I heard the loud crash," says Jin. "And the ground began to cave in and all of a sudden the sides of the road became higher.

"I wanted to stop my motorcycle, but couldn't. It stopped only after hitting a guardrail and I was thrown off the bike." The sinking feeling still sends shudders⁷ up his spine⁸, he says.

His first reaction after he recovered was to ring up his police station. He looked around, while still talking over his cell phone, and saw 11 vehicles in the crater, including a bus with passengers. And he started shouting instantly that they should leave.

Jin's parents, both 60, are farmers. "I always wanted to be a policeman. My father, too, dreamed of being one but couldn't realize his dream," he says. "I have lived his dream."

Jin rang up his parents on that fateful day only after coming out of a hospital where he was treated for his injury.

"I just told them briefly⁹ what had happened I didn't want them to get worried," Jin says, emotion welling up in his eyes for the first time.