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Florida man swallowed by sinkhole under bedroom feared dead Florida man swallowed by sinkhole under bedroom feared dead
(about 5 hours later)
A Florida man screamed for help and disappeared as a large sinkhole opened under his bedroom, his brother said Friday. No signs of life have been found. A Florida man screamed for help and disappeared as a large sinkhole opened under his bedroom, his brother said on Friday. No signs of life have been found.
Jeremy Bush heard a loud crash and screaming. He said it took him seconds to get to his brother Jeff's room near midnight Thursday, but the earth had already swallowed him. Jeff Bush, 37, was presumed dead on Friday, the victim of a sinkhole a hazard so common in Florida that state law requires home insurers to provide coverage against the danger.
Jeremy Bush said he jumped into the hole and was quickly up to his neck in dirt. The sinkhole, estimated at 20 feet (6 metres) across and 20 feet deep, caused the home's concrete floor to cave in on Thursday as everyone in the Tampa-area house was turning in for the night. It gave way with a loud crash that sounded like a car hitting the house and brought Bush's brother running.
"The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn't care. I wanted to save my brother," he said. "But I just couldn't do nothing."
/>He added: "He was screaming my name. I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him." 		Jeremy Bush said he jumped into the hole but couldn't see his brother and had to be rescued himself by a sheriff's deputy who reached out and pulled him to safety as the ground crumbled around him.
An arriving law enforcement officer pulled him to safety. "I reached down and was able to actually able to get him by his hand and pull him out of the hole. The hole was collapsing. At that time, we left the house," Hillsborough County Sheriff's Deputy Douglas Duvall said. "The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn't care. I wanted to save my brother," Jeremy Bush said in a neighbour's yard. "But I just couldn't do nothing."
"When he got there, there was no bedroom left," Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokeswoman Jessica Damico said. "There was no furniture. All he saw was a piece of the mattress sticking up." He added: "I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him."
There's been no contact with 36-year-old Jeff Bush since then, and neighbors on both sides of the home have been evacuated. Officials lowered equipment into the sinkhole and saw no signs of life, said Hillsborough County fire rescue spokeswoman Jessica Damico.
"We put engineering equipment into the sinkhole and didn't see anything compatible with life," Damico said. But Damico would not say that the man is presumed dead. A dresser and the TV set had vanished down the hole, along with most of Bush's bed.
Damico estimated that the sinkhole was about 30 feet (9 meters) across.
/>"The entire house is on the sinkhole," Damico said.		 "All I could see was the cable wire running from the TV going down into the hole. I saw a corner of the bed and a corner of the box spring and the frame of the bed," Jeremy Bush said.
Sinkholes are common in seaside Florida, whose underlying limestone and dolomite can be worn away by water and chemicals, then collapse. Authorities on Friday said they used equipment especially for such situations that can detect sounds as faint as a mouse running over a floor. At a news conference on Friday night, county administrator Mike Merrill described the home as "seriously unstable." He said no one can go in the home because officials were afraid of another collapse and losing more lives. The soil around the home was very soft and the sinkhole was expected to grow.
But the equipment detected nothing from the missing man. Engineers said they may have to demolish the house, even though from the outside there appeared to be nothing wrong with the four-bedroom, concrete-wall structure, built in 1974.
From the outside of the house, nothing appeared wrong. There were no cracks, and the only sign something was amiss was the yellow caution tape circling the house. Florida is highly prone to sinkholes because there are caverns below ground of limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water. A sinkhole near Orlando grew to 400 feet across in 1981 and claimed five sports cars, most of two businesses, a three-bedroom house and the deep end of an Olympic-size swimming pool.
Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office spokesman Larry McKinnon said Friday they asked sinkhole and engineering experts to come to the home. The experts are using equipment to see if the ground can support the weight of heavy machinery that is needed for the recovery effort. More than 500 sinkholes have been reported in Hillsborough County alone since the government started keeping track in 1954, according to the state's environmental agency.
Janell Wheeler told the Tampa Bay Times newspaper she was inside the house with four other adults and a child when the sinkhole opened. "It sounded like a car hit my house," she said. Jeremy Bush said someone came out to the home a couple of months ago to check for sinkholes and other things, apparently for insurance purposes.
Wheeler's house was condemned. The rest of the family went to a hotel but she stayed behind, sleeping in her car. "I just want my nephew," she said through tears. "He said there was nothing wrong with the house. Nothing. And a couple of months later, my brother dies. In a sinkhole," Bush said.
Six people were at the home at the time, including Jeremy Bush's wife and his 2-year-old daughter. The brothers worked maintenance jobs, including picking up trash along highways.