|
| Jeremy Bush places flowers and a stuffed animal at a makeshift memorial in front of a home where a sinkhole opened up underneath a bedroom late Thursday evening and swallowed his brother Jeffrey in Seffner, Fla. on Saturday, March 2, 2013. Jeffrey Bush, 37, was in his bedroom Thursday night when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five other people were in the house but managed to escape unharmed. Bush's brother jumped into the hole to try to help, but he had to be rescued himself by a sheriff's deputy. |
SEFFNER, Fla.
(AP) -- The effort to find the body of a Florida man who was swallowed
by a sinkhole under his Florida home was called off Saturday and crews
planned to begin demolishing the four-bedroom house.
The
20-foot-wide opening of the sinkhole is almost completely covered by
the house and rescuers feared it would collapse on them if they tried to
search for Jeff Bush, 37. Crews were testing the unstable ground
surrounding the home and evacuated two neighboring homes as a
precaution.
Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said heavy equipment would be brought in to begin the demolition Sunday morning.
"At
this point it's really not possible to recover the body," Merrill said,
later adding "we're dealing with a very unusual sinkhole."
Jessica
Damico, spokeswoman for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, said the
demolition equipment would be placed on what they believe is solid
ground and reach onto the property to pull apart the house. The crew
will try pulling part of the house away from the sinkhole intact so some
heirlooms and mementoes can be retrieved.
Bush
was in his bedroom Thursday night in Seffner - a suburb of 8,000 people
15 miles east of downtown Tampa - when the earth opened and took him
and everything else in his room. Five others in the house escape
unharmed.
On Saturday, the normally quiet
neighborhood of concrete block homes painted in Florida pastels was
jammed with cars as engineers, reporters, and curious onlookers came to
the scene.
At the home next door to the
Bushes, a family cried and organized boxes. Testing determined that
their house and another was compromised by the sinkhole. The families
were allowed to go inside for about a half-hour to gather belongings.
Sisters Soliris and Elbairis Gonzalez, who live on the same street as Bushes, said neighbors were worried for their safety.
"I've had nightmares," Soliris Gonzalez, 31, said. "In my dreams, I keep checking for cracks in the house."
They
said the family has discussed where to go if forced to evacuate, and
they've taken their important documents to a storage unit.
"The rest of it, this is material stuff, as long as our family is fine," Soliris Gonzalez said.
"You never know underneath the ground what's happening," added Elbairis Gonzalez, 30.
Experts
say thousands of sinkholes form yearly in Florida because of the
state's unique geography, though most are small and deaths rarely occur.
"There's
hardly a place in Florida that's immune to sinkholes," said Sandy
Nettles, who owns a geology consulting company in the Tampa area.
"There's no way of ever predicting where a sinkhole is going to occur."
Most
sinkholes are small, like one found Saturday morning in Largo, 35 miles
away from Seffner. The Largo sinkhole, about 10 feet long and several
feet wide, is in a mall parking lot.
The state
sits on limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water, with a
layer of clay on top. The clay is thicker in some locations - including
the area where Bush became a victim - making them even more prone to
sinkholes.
Jonathan Arthur, the state
geologist and director of the Florida Geological Survey, said other
states sit atop limestone in a similar way, but Florida has additional
factors like extreme weather, development, aquifer pumping and
construction. "The conditions under which a sinkhole will form can be
very rapid, or they can form slowly over time," he said.
But it remained unclear Saturday what, if anything, caused the Seffner sinkhole.
"The condition that caused that sinkhole could have started a million years ago," Nettles said.
Jeremy Bush, who tried to rescue his brother, lay flowers and a stuffed lamb near the house Saturday morning and wept.
He
said someone came to his home a couple of months ago to check for
sinkholes and other issues, apparently for insurance purposes, but found
nothing wrong. State law requires home insurers to provide coverage
against sinkholes.
"And a couple of months later, my brother dies. In a sinkhole," Bush said Friday.
