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Police tape surrounds the house of Jeff Bush who was consumed by a sinkhole in Seffner, Florida. (AFP)
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Seffner (Florida), March 2 (AP): Engineers worked gingerly today to find out more about a slowly growing sinkhole that had swallowed a Florida man in his bedroom, believing the entire house could succumb to the unstable ground.
Jeff Bush, 37, was in his bedroom on Thursday night when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five other people were in the house but escaped unharmed. Bush’s brother jumped into the hole to try to help, but he had to be rescued by a sheriff’s deputy.
Engineers returned to the property this morning to do more tests after taking soil samples and running tests there all day yesterday. They said the entire lot was dangerous, and no one was allowed in the house.
“I cannot tell you why it has not collapsed yet,” said Bill Bracken, the owner of an engineering company called to assess the sinkhole. He described the earth below as a “very large, very fluid mass”.
“This is not your typical sinkhole,” said Michael Merrill, the Hillsborough County administrator. “This is a chasm. For that reason, we’re being very deliberate.” The hole had grown to 20 feet deep and 30 feet wide by last night, and officials said it was still expanding and “seriously unstable”.
Officials delicately addressed another sad reality: Bush was likely dead, and the family wanted his body. “They would like us to go in quickly and locate Bush,” Merrill said.
Two neighbouring houses were evacuated, and officials were considering further evacuations. Members of the media were moved from a lawn across the street to a safer area a few hundred feet away.
Sinkholes are so common in Florida that the state requires home insurers to provide coverage against the danger. While some cars, homes and other buildings have been devoured, it is extremely rare for a sinkhole to swallow a person.
Florida is highly prone to sinkholes because of the underground prevalence of limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water, creating caverns. “You can almost envision a piece of Swiss cheese,” Taylor Yarkosky, a sinkhole expert from Brooksville, Fla., said while gesturing to the ground and the sky-blue house where the earth opened in Seffner.
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