SEFFNER, Florida (Reuters)-a Florida man was missing and feared dead on Friday after a large Sinkhole suddenly engulfed the bedroom of her suburban home, Tampa police and fire officials said.
Jeff Bush, 36, was in his room sleeping and five other family members were getting ready for bed on Thursday night, when they heard a loud crash and Jeff screaming.
Jeff's brother, 35-year-old Jeremy Bush, jumped into the hole and furiously kept digging to find his brother.
"I feel in my heart that he didn't make it," Jeremy said Tampa station WFTS-TV. "There were six of us at home; five got. "
Jeremy the same had to be saved from sinkhole of first responder to the emergency call, Douglas Duvall of the Sheriff's Office in Hillsborough County. When Duvall entered the bedroom of Jeff Bush, all I saw was a growing chasm but no sign of Jeff.
"The hole took the entire bedroom," says Duvall. "You could see the bed frame, Dresser, everything was sinking," he said.
Norman Wicker, 48, the father of Jeremy's girlfriend who has also lived in the House, ran to get a flashlight and a shovel.
"Looked like a car ran into the back of the House," said wicker.
Authorities had not detected any sign of life after listening devices and cameras lowered into the hole and rescue efforts were suspended after the site has been deemed too dangerous for rescue personnel to enter.
"There is a very large mass, very fluid under this House making the whole House and the entire lot, dangerous and unsafe," Bill Bracken, head of an engineering company that assists fire and rescue officers, told a press conference late on Friday.
"We are still trying to determine the extent and nature of what is down there, so we can better determine how to approach it and to extricate, said Bracken.
Several nearby houses were evacuated in case the 30 feet (9 meters) wide Sinkhole has gotten larger but officials said that appeared to be increasingly profound.
The Bush brothers worked together as landscapers, according to Leland Wicker, 48, one of the other inhabitants of the House.
The risk of sinkholes is common in Florida due to porous geological substratum status, according to the Florida Department of environmental protection. As rainwater percolates down into the Earth, melts the rock causing erosion that can lead to underground caverns, sinkholes when causing collapse.
Florida suffered one of its worst accidents sinkhole in 1994 when a 15-story-deep chasm opened East of Tampa at a phosphate mine. Created a hole 185 feet deep and more than 160 feet wide. Locals dubbed newest attraction at Disney World-' journey to the center of the Earth. '
In 1981 in Winter Park, near Orlando, a sinkhole was measured as 320 feet wide and 90 feet deep, swallow a two-storey house, part of a Porsche dealership and an Olympic-size pool. The site now is an artificial lake in the city.
"Mortgage companies are more and more requiring Florida home buyers to have a Sinkhole coverage on their insurance policy homeowners," said K.C. Williams, a sinkhole damage and Tampa property claims lawyer who lives 2 miles away from home damaged.
(Additional reporting by David Adams and Tom Brown; Written by Kevin Gray; Editing by Tom Brown and Lisa Shumaker)
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