His brother heard a scream and a loud bang. Most of the bedroom had vanished when he made it down the corridor.
Sinkholes occur a lot where the rock is soft. Image credit: Poliorketes/shutterstock.com
Over the past few days, an upsetting Reddit tale of a guy who was sucked into a sinkhole in Florida on March 1, 2013, has reappeared.
He was dozing off when a sinkhole appeared beneath Jeff Bush’s home in Seffner, Florida. According to The Guardian, the hole opened beneath his bedroom and was roughly 6 meters (20 feet) across and deep. His brother Jeremy and Jeremy’s partner Rachel could hear it from another room.
“We heard Jeff scream,” Rachel told ABC Action News then. “We ran down the hallway, I flicked the light on, and we opened the door, and all we saw was a big old hole, and Jeff was gone.”
As the ground around him started to crumble, Jeremy dove into the hole to save his brother but had to be hauled to safety by a Hillsborough County constable.
“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 told The Guardian. “But I just couldn’t do anything.”
“I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him.”
Rescuers could not pull Bush’s body from the sinkhole after it ate some bedroom furnishings. The following day, engineers decided that the house and the surrounding area were too hazardous for further rescue attempts, so they demolished it and filled the hole with gravel. A few years later, the site was closed to the public when the sinkhole reopened there.
Sinkholes are particularly common in Florida because of their limestone abundance.
“Sinkholes are most common in what geologists call ‘karst terrain,'” the US Geological Survey explains. “These are regions where the types of rock below the land surface can naturally be dissolved by groundwater circulating through them. Soluble rocks include salt beds and domes, gypsum, limestone, and other carbonate rock.”
Caverns are left beneath the surface when the rock beneath has been dissolved. A sinkhole is produced when the unstable surface collapses into a cavern. They range in size from extremely little to the enormous structure seen at Xiaozhai Tiankeng, also called the Xiaozhai Heavenly Pit. The world’s alleged greatest sinkhole is 662 meters (1,667-2,172 feet) deep and 537 meters (1,762 feet) broad.
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