SEFFNER, Fla. — 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 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 on 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.
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"Search for body in Florida sinkhole called off
SEFFNER — The effort to find the body of a Florida man who was swallowed by a cave-in under his Florida home was called off Saturday and crews planned to begin demolishing the four-bedroom house. The 20-foot-wide hole is almost completely covered by the house and rescuers feared it would collapse on them if they tried to search for Jeff Bush, 37. Five others in Bush’s house escaped unharmed in the Thursday accident."
Related: Most of house demolished after sinkhole cave-in
Site of deadly sinkhole excavated, but resident’s body may never be found
Another kind of sinking:
"New Mexico woman dies when Fla. dive boat capsizes" by SUZETTE LABOY | Associated Press, November 24, 2012
MIAMI — A diver who died in a Thanksgiving Day boating accident was a manager at one of the nation’s leading research laboratories, authorities said Friday.
Nina Poppelsdorf, 54, was a senior manager of the radiation protection, industrial hygiene, and safety center at Sandia National Laboratories, lab spokeswoman Heather Clark said. She was hired in 1992 at the federal research and development center.
Darrell Fong, a Sandia Labs safety engineering manager who worked with Poppelsdorf, said Poppelsdorf was a leader of a Sandia team that helped in the response to the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami left several reactors there without cooling water....
Accident, huh?
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Boating "accidents" in my paper are beginning to draw as much skepticism as plane crashes. Looking more and more like assassinations.
And the Jehovah’s Witnesses didn't even make it to the beach?
More from the old memory hole:
Printed Globe carried the story.
Also see:
Related:
I'm not covering it anymore.
Got lost in the fog, too.
