[caption id="attachment_62902" align="alignright" width="640"] Florida Sinkhole Home Demolished: Sinkhole Victim's Brother Upset Over Rescue Efforts[/caption]Suburban Tampa FL Man Assumed Dead In Sink Hole

A Florida man is currently being assumed dead after a sink whole randomly sprung up in the middle of his suburban family home outside of Tampa. Late Thursday afternoon the rest of the family heard a loud noise coming from one of the bedrooms and rushed in to find a massive sink hole had swallowed most of the bedroom whole.

The police were quickly called to the scene and managed to save the man's brother who had jumped in the sink whole to try and rescue his brother. The police promptly made everyone evacuate the house as the sink hole seemed to be growing and some of the surrounding residents were asked to leave as well.

The sink hole itself is roughly 30 feet wide and 20 foot deep, and authorities are saying it's still growing. No signs have been seen or heard from the man since the whole incident first began.

"All they could see was a part of a mattress sticking out of the hole," said Hillsborough County Fire Rescue Chief Ron Rogers. "Essentially the floor of that room had opened up."

Rescue crews are still currently on site though rescue attempts have stalled as engineers now worry about the safety of the housing structure as a whole.

According to a report from Reuters, a sheriff deputy who arrived at the scene rescued the man's brother who jumped in the sinkhole and tried to rescue him.

"I feel in my heart he didn't make it," the brother, Jeremy Bush, told Tampa TV station WFTS. "There were six of us in the house, five got out."

Bush said he thought he heard a screem for help.

"I didn't see any part of him when I went in there," he said. "I told my father-in-law to grab a shovel and I started digging. Then the cops showed up and pulled me out of the hole and told me the floor was still falling in."

Not the first bedroom to be swallowed by a sinkhole

On July 19, 2011, Inocenta Hernandez, heard a loud noise that sounded like an explosion. She first ran outside to check things out only to find that the “thunderous boom” came from her own bedroom.

A gaping sinkhole formed under her bed stretching 40-feet deep by three-feet wide. Hernandez, 65-years old, is thankful no one was hurt including her grandchildren that were playing nearby. This hole is small in comparison to other recent occurrences in the same area. A 2010 sinkhole reportedly swallowed a home and a three-story building. In 2007, a 330-foot deep sinkhole claimed the lives of three people and several homes.

Sinkholes, or giant pits in the earth, are typically brought about by heavy rain storms and/or sewer problems causing erosion. Guatemala City is prone to these natural depressions in the earth mainly because it was built on volcanic deposits and endures heavy annual rainfall.

In 2010, a rapidly expanding sinkhole in Ohio was so monstrous that it took just minutes to swallow four football fields worth of land and part of a state highway.

Authorities say the sinkhole began with the collapse of a pond near State Highway 516.
The pond and land belong to the Newton Asphalt Company which has been dredging for sand at depths of 50 feet.

Last year in Ottawa, fire officials say a driver suffered minor injuries after a car went into a sinkhole.

Spokesman Marc Messier says the car fell into the hole on the Highway 174 off-ramp at Jeanne D’arc Boulevard.

Rescue workers haven’t been able to go in and retrieve his body because the ground is too unstable.

The operation has been changed into to a demolition phase.

Now officials say the sinkhole is growing and threatening a neighboring home.

Hillsborough County is part of an area known as “sinkhole alley” that accounts for two-thirds of reported sinkholes in the state.

Demolition crews in Florida on Sunday began to take down the home of a man who is presumed dead after his bedroom collapsed into a huge sinkhole.

The mans brother said Monday at a press conference, that he believes rescuers could have "tried harder" to save his brother.

"I tried my hardest to get you out, brother," a tearful Jeremy Bush said at a news conference today. "I think I'm the only one that really tried to get you out. They said the ground was too unstable to do anything, but they got all this heavy equipment on there, pulling stuff out and everyone's cheering for everything that's coming out of the house. I've had enough of the cheering."

Sources

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/01/us-usa-florida-sinkhole-idUSBRE9200NH20130301

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/01/florida-sinkhole