A 79-year-old man walked away unharmed after his car fell into a nearly two-metre-deep hole at a construction site Sunday in Dartmouth.

Police responded to the 600 block of Windmill Road just before 7 p.m. Sunday.

A witness told police a vehicle had driven through a construction site and fell into a gaping hole.

“Oh, it was big and deep…you could drive a truck into it, I think,” says Randall Nelson, who drove by the site shortly after the accident.

He says it was dark and rainy at the time.

“If the lines and the pylons weren’t set up properly, I could see how you could have driven around them somehow and ended up in the wrong place, down a big hole.”

Police say traffic pylons were at the site but they may have been placed too far apart where the driver entered.

The Department of Labour was quickly notified and the hole was filled in soon after the accident.

City officials say the hole was made at the site so water could be hooked up at a nearby development project.

“They had the proper permits and now what we’re doing is, we have a third party who will come in and give us some information about what were the measures in place, and did they meet all the requirements that were part of their permits.” says city spokeswoman Shaune MacKinlay.

When construction work is being done, the developer is required to bring in a company to do traffic control.

The company responsible for dealing with the flow of traffic on the work site is On Guard Traffic Control by Sojourn. When CTV News phoned the company Monday, a man, who wouldn’t identify himself, said all the provincial standards on the work site had been met.

While there were pylons placed at the site, the Department of Labour requires other safeguards when dealing with a hole deeper than 1.2 metres.

“The regulation specifically calls for a fence, a guard, or a barrier,” says department spokesman Kevin Finch.

The Halifax Regional Municipality is investigating the incident, along with the provincial Labour Department.

“We’ll be going over the records at the work site to see what practices were taken, but we are trying to determine what precautions were taken,” says Finch. “Were they in compliance with the regulations under the Occupational Health and Safety Act?”

As for the elderly driver, fire officials managed to free him by pulling him through the front windshield of the car.

The man was shaken, but not hurt. He was taken to the Dartmouth General Hospital as a precaution and later released.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Garreth MacDonald