SEFFNER, FLORIDA – In a matter of seconds, the earth opened under Jeff Bush’s Florida bedroom and swallowed him up like something out of a horror movie.
Bush, 37, was presumed dead Friday, the victim of a sinkhole — a hazard so common in Florida that state law requires home insurers to provide coverage against the danger.
The sinkhole, estimated at 6 meters across and about the same depth, caused the home’s concrete floor to cave in 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.
Jeremy Bush said he jumped into the hole but could not 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.
“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 through tears Friday in a neighbor’s yard. “But I just couldn’t do nothing.”
He added, “I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him.”
Officials lowered equipment into the sinkhole and saw no signs of life.
A dresser and the TV set had vanished down the hole, along with most of Bush’s bed.
“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.
County administrator Mike Merrill described the home as “seriously unstable.” He said no one can go in the home because officials are afraid of another collapse and losing more lives.
Engineers said they may have to demolish the small house even though from the outside there appears to be nothing wrong with the four-bedroom, concrete-wall structure, which was built in 1974.
Florida is highly prone to sinkholes because of its limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water, creating caverns. A sinkhole near Orlando grew to 120 meters across in 1981 and devoured five sports cars, most of two businesses, a three-bedroom house and the deep end of an Olympic-size swimming pool.
More than 500 sinkholes have been reported in Hillsborough County alone since the government started keeping track in 1954.
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