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| In this undated photo released by Jeremy Bush, shows his brother Jeff Bush. Jeremy Bush heard a loud crash and screaming coming from his brother's room early Thursday, March 1, 2013 in Seffner, Fla. A large sinkhole opened under Jeff's bedroom and he disappeared together with most of the bedroom furniture. Jeremy jumped into the hole and was quickly up to his neck in dirt. Jeff is presumed dead. |
SEFFNER, Fla.
(AP) -- In a matter of seconds, the earth opened under Jeff Bush's
bedroom and swallowed him up like something out of a horror movie. About
the only thing left was the TV cable running down into the hole.
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 20 feet across and 20 feet deep, caused the home's concrete
floor to cave in around 11 p.m. 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 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.
"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 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, said
Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokeswoman Jessica Damico.
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.
Engineers
worked to determine whether the ground was stable enough to support
heavy machinery to help them recover the body. Workers with rope tied
around them took soil samples from the yard.
Engineers
said they may have to demolish the small, sky-blue house, even though
from the outside there appeared to be nothing wrong with the
four-bedroom, concrete-wall structure, built in 1974.
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 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, according to the state's
environmental agency.
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.
"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.
