A story about a man swallowed by a sinkhole in Florida on March 1, 2013 has been back on Reddit for the past few days. While 37-year-old Jeff Bush was sleeping in his home in Seffner, Florida, a pothole opened under his home. As The Guardian reports, the sinkhole, about 6 meters wide and deep, opened under the bedroom, and his voice was heard from another room by his brother Jeremy and Jeremy’s partner Hannah.
“We heard Jeff screaming,” Hannah told ABC Action News at the time, adding: “We ran out into the hallway, turned on the light and opened the door, and all we saw was a big old hole and Jeff was gone.”
Jeremy jumped into the pit to save his brother, but had to be hauled to safety by the Hillsborough County deputy sheriff as the ground around him continued to collapse.
“The ground was still sinking and the ground was still going down, but I didn’t care,” Jeremy told The Guardian. I wanted to save my brother,” he said, but said he could do nothing: “I could have sworn I heard him shout my name to help him.”
Rescuers did not find Bush’s body in the sinkhole, which swallowed the bedroom furniture with him. The next day the engineers decided that the house and ground were too dangerous to attempt any further rescue and instead the house was demolished; the pit itself was filled with gravel. A few years later, a sinkhole was opened once again in the area, now fenced off to prevent public access.
The incident was reflected in the news 10 years ago as follows:
How are potholes formed?
Sinkholes can often be seen in Florida’s limestone-rich soil. “Sinkholes are most commonly seen in what geologists call ‘karst terrain,'” explains the US Geological Survey. “These are regions where rock types below the land surface can be naturally dissolved by groundwater circulating in them. Salt deposits among soluble rocks. and domes, gypsum, limestone, and other carbonate rocks.”
Underground caves are formed when the underlying rocks melt. It also creates a sinkhole when the weakened surface sinks into the cave. Considered to be the largest in the world, the sinkhole is approximately 537 meters wide and 662 meters deep.
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