Man killed after he was swallowed up by 100ft SINKHOLE under his bedroom pictured for the first time as engineers battle to find him

• Jeff Bush, 37, screamed for help as he was sucked into the hole in Florida
  
• Brother: 'I heard him screaming for me but I couldn't do anything'
  
• 'Safe to presume' he is dead, say fire officials
• House deemed too unstable to continue rescue effort this morning

By KERRY MCDERMOTT and LYDIA WARREN

PUBLISHED: 12:12 GMT, 1 March 2013 | UPDATED: 22:27 GMT, 1 March 2013

Engineers are carrying out sonar tests at a Florida house in a frantic bid to find a 37-year-old man who was sucked into a 100-foot-wide sink hole that opened up under his bedroom.

Jeff Bush, 37, is presumed dead after he was swallowed into the 50-foot-deep hole and trapped beneath the rubble at his family's house in Brandon, near Tampa, Florida on Thursday night.

Crews have cautiously used ground penetrating sonar equipment at the site to map the subsurface around the home to determine the extent of the danger.

Rescue crews will take this information and create a plan of action to recover the victim.

Workers swarmed the area as Jeremy Bush, 36, recalled how he desperately tried to pull Jeff from the rubble as he heard his screams for help.

'We heard a loud crash,' Jeremy told My Fox Tampa Bay as he broke down in tears. 'I ran in there and heard somebody screaming, my brother screaming, and I ran in there.

'And all I see is this big hole. All I see is the top of his bed. I didn't see anything else, so I jumped in the hole and tried getting him out.

"The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn't care. I wanted to save my brother. I could hear him screaming for me, hollering for me. I couldn't do nothing.'

The dresser and the TV set also vanished down the hole, he said.

'All I could see was the cable wire running from the TV going down into the hole. I saw a corner of the bed and a corner of the box spring and the frame of the bed,' he said.

Hillsborough County Fire Rescue officials arrived at the home at 11 p.m. on Thursday and the first officer on the scene rescued Jeremy Bush from the edge of the chasm.

Lt. Donald Morris from Hillbosourgh County Sheriff's Department described the scene officers found.

'The mattress, the bed, everything was actually going down in the hole where the first person had gone and now the second person is in the hole trying to save the first,' he said.

'And they're not being successful so [the rescuer is] just reacting and doing what they have to do to get that person out. It was deep enough that the person he pulled out to safety was not ale to fully extend their arms and even reach the top.'

Jeff Bush was nowhere in sight and rescuers determined the home had become too unstable to continue search efforts.

Listening devices and cameras were placed in the hole but there had been no contact with the missing man by early Friday.

'We put engineering equipment into the sinkhole and didn't see anything compatible with life,' Fire rescue spokeswoman Jessica Damico said.

She said that the sinkhole was 30 feet across at the surface, but that engineers have estimated that below the surface it could be as wide as 100 feet and 50 feet deep.

'The entire house is on the sinkhole,' Damico said.

Engineers worked on Friday to determine whether the ground was stable enough to support heavy machinery to help them recover the body.

They said they may have to demolish the small, sky-blue house, even though from the outside, there appeared to be nothing wrong with the four-bedroom, concrete-wall structure, built in 1974.

The sinkhole is not visible above ground except from inside the house, and officials believe its center is beneath the bedroom. From the outside, there are no cracks visible.

FULL STORY + VIDEO: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2286514/Florida-sinkhole-Br...