Featured Image Credit: ABC Action News
Topics: US News
Ben Thompson
A Florida man has been presumed dead after he disappeared down a sinkhole that opened up beneath his bedroom.
Jeffrey Bush was heard screaming by his brother Jeremy in March, 2013, after a gaping 100 foot hole opened up underneath Jeffrey's bedroom.
Racing into his brother's room, Jeremy jumped into the hole to try and rescue him, but the mud was already rising to neck level.
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Jeffrey was nowhere to be seen.
After a few days, the ground and the house were deemed too dangerous for engineers to venture into, and rescue efforts were called off.
As a result, the house was demolished and the ground was filled with gravel.
However, the sinkhole reopened a few years later and has been fenced off from the public as a safety precaution.
Recounting the tragic day his brother vanished, Jeremy said: "The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn't care.
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"He was screaming my name. I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him. I wanted to save my brother. But I just couldn't do nothing."
Jeremy himself had to be pulled out of the hole by a police officer from the Tampa Police Department.
Equipment had been lowered into the sinkhole to aid the search for Jeffrey but no trace of him was found.
On the surface level, the hole was around 30 feet wide but it was 100 feet wide underneath the ground.
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Jeremy's wife and daughter were in the house at the time of the incident, and he claimed his daughter was missing her uncle.
Jeremy said: "She keeps asking where her Uncle Jeff is. I lost everything. I work so hard to support my wife and kid and I lost everything."
Given that Jeremy hasn't been found for ten years, he is presumed dead.
Sinkholes are a recurring problem in the state of Florida due to the limestone underneath the soil which can melt in the rain.
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According to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection database, there were about 27,000 reported sinkhole incidents across the state in 2022.
Though sinkholes have occurred in various places around the world.
In 2020, a sinkhole opened up outside a shopping mall on Cuibai Avenue in Yibin, a city of around 5.5 million people in Sichuan Province, China. Twenty one cars were swallowed up, but fortunately nobody was injured.
Here in the UK, a woman encountered a smaller sinkhole while returning from a night out. Laura Gerber stepped into what she thought was a puddle, only to fall down a 10 foot hole.
Yikes.