Police Stop Searching for Man Who Fell Into Florida Sinkhole

A search for the body of a man swallowed up by a sinkhole has been given up by authorities in Florida on Saturday.  The tragedy has stunned observers worldwide, and authorities are still searching for an adequate explanation for what happened.   A sinkhole appeared beneath a man’s house for no apparent reason, and the hole sucked him in, with him disappearing without a trace.

The body of Jeff Bush, who disappeared beneath the bedroom of his house in Tampa, Florida, just could not be found. Authorities said they gave up the search because of the danger of the house collapsing into the hole which seems to be getting bigger all the time.

“We just have not been able to locate Mr. Bush and so for that reason the rescue effort is being discontinued,” Mike Merrill, county administrator for HillsboroughCounty, told reporters Saturday evening. “At this point, it’s really not possible to recover the body.”

“We’ve done everything we believe that we can. We wish we could have done more,” Merrill said. He added the next plan of action would be to demolish the entire home and would probably begin on Sunday morning. He said that the workers were dealing with a “very unusual sinkhole” — very deep, wide and extremely unstable. He added that the sinkhole was about 50 or 60 feet deep.

Jeff’s brother, Jeremy Bush, said that he heard his brother scream on Thursday night after a horrendous noise erupted. “I ran toward my brother’s bedroom because I heard my brother scream,” he told to CNN’s “AC360.”

He continued, “Everything was gone. My brother’s bed, my brother’s dresser, my brother’s TV. My brother was gone.” He continued, “I couldn’t get him out. I tried so hard. I tried everything I could. I could swear I heard him calling out,” he said.

He told how he had stood in the hole and dug with a shovel trying to help his brother until police arrived and ordered him out because the floor was still collapsing.

A recording of the woman who telephoned the police by calling 911 was made as usual and you can hear the absolute panic in her voice. “The house just fell through,” a female voice says on the recording released Friday by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

“The bedroom floor just collapsed, and my brother-in-law is in there. He’s underneath the house,” she says.

Jeremy Bush and four other people, including a 2-year-old child, were uninjured.

As the sinkhole continued to deepen Friday, nearby homes were evacuated as a precaution.

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