Crowd gathers for Florida sinkhole house demolition
Sinkhole about 10 metres across opened in bedroom
Jeff Bush's brother jumped in to save him and rescued
CREWS with heavy equipment on Sunday began the demolition of a Florida home over a huge sinkhole where a man is presumed dead after being swallowed by the earth.
The search for Jeff Bush, 37, was called off Saturday, and a heavy machine with a large bucket scoop was moved into position Sunday.
The 20-foot-wide opening of the sinkhole was almost covered by the house, and rescuers said there were no signs of life since the hole opened Thursday.
Bush was in the bedroom of his home east of Tampa on Thursday night when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room.
Five others in the house escaped unharmed.
Jeremy Bush, the man who tried to save his brother, was escorted with a woman by a deputy to the front of the house early Sunday before equipment moved into position. He repositioned some flowers from a makeshift memorial to a safer location, where Bush and the unidentified women knelt in prayer.
People gathered on lawn chairs, bundled up with blankets against unusually chilly weather. Several dozen milled about within view, including officials and reporters.
Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said he had talked to Bush family Sunday. Crews, Merrill said, would try their best to move the structure forward, toward the street, so the family can briefly enter to get belongings.
"We don't know, in fact, whether it will collapse or whether it will hold up," he said. He said crews' goal for Sunday is to knock down the house, and on Monday they will clear the debris as much as possible to allow officials and engineers to see the sinkhole in the open.
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"We're dealing with a very unusual sinkhole," he said.
On Saturday, the normally quiet neighbourhood of concrete block homes painted in Florida pastels was jammed with cars as engineers, journalists and curious onlookers came to the scene.
At the home next door to the Bushes, a family cried and organised boxes.
Testing had determined their house was also compromised by the sinkhole, according to Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokesman Ronnie Rivera.
The family, which had evacuated on Friday, was allowed to go inside for about a half-hour to gather belongings.
Sisters Soliris and Elbairis Gonzalez, who live on the same street as Bushes, says rumours are circulating among neighbours who are concerned for their safety.
"I've had nightmares," Soliris Gonzalez, 31, said.
"In my dreams, I keep checking for cracks in the house."
Experts say thousands of sinkholes erupt yearly in Florida because of the state's unique geography, though most are small and deaths rarely occur.
"There's hardly a place in Florida that's immune to sinkholes," said Sandy Nettles, who owns a geology consultancy in the Tampa area.
"There's no way of ever predicting where a sinkhole is going to occur."
"I cannot tell you why it has not collapsed yet," Bill Bracken, the owner of an engineering company called to assess the sinkhole, said of the home.
He described the earth below as a "very large, very fluid mass."
"This is not your typical sinkhole," said Hillsborough County administrator Mike Merrill.
Jeff Bush is presumed dead after he disappeared when a large sinkhole opened under his bedroom.
"This is a chasm. For that reason, we're being very deliberate."
Earlier, two adjacent houses were evacuated and officials were considering further evacuations.
Even the media was moved from a lawn across the street to a safer area a few hundred feet away.
"This is a very complex situation," said Hillsborough County Fire Chief Ron Rogers.
"It's continuing to evolve and the ground is continuing to collapse."
Sinkholes are so common in Florida that state law requires home insurers to provide coverage against the danger.
While some cars, homes and other buildings have been devoured, it's extremely rare for them to swallow a person.
Florida is highly prone to sinkholes because there are caverns below ground of limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water.
"You can almost envision a piece of Swiss cheese," said Taylor Yarkosky, a sinkhole expert from Brooksville, Florida, said while gesturing to the ground and the sky blue home where the earth opened in Seffner.
"Any house in Florida could be in that same situation."
A sinkhole near Orlando grew to 122 metres across in 1981 and devoured five sports cars, most of two businesses, a three-bedroom house and the deep end of an Olympic-size swimming pool.
More than 500 sinkholes have been reported in Hillsborough County alone since the government started keeping track in 1954, according to the state's environmental agency.
Jeremy Bush, brother of Jeff Bush, breaks down as he speaks to the media about attempting to rescue Jeff as he disappeared in a sinkhole in his bedroom.
The sinkhole, estimated at 6 metres across and 6 metres deep, caused the home's concrete floor to cave in around 11pm on Thursday (3pm Friday AEDT) 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 himself 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 neighbour's yard.
"But I just couldn't do nothing."
He added: "I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him."
A dresser and the TV set had vanished down the hole, along with most of Bush's bed.
A sheriff's deputy who was the first to respond to a frantic 911 call said when he arrived, he saw Jeremy Bush.
Deputy Douglas Duvall said he reached down as if he was "sticking his hand into the floor" to help Jeremy Bush. Mr Duvall said he didn't see anyone else in the hole.
As he pulled Bush out, "everything was sinking," Mr Duvall said.
Engineers said they may have to demolish the small house, even though from the outside there appeared to be nothing wrong with the four-bedroom, concrete-wall structure, built in 1974.
Jeremy Bush said someone came out to the home a couple of months ago to check for sinkholes and other things, apparently for insurance purposes.
"He said there was nothing wrong with the house. Nothing. And a couple of months later, my brother dies. In a sinkhole," Mr Bush said.
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