EnglishLady
Veteran Expediter
Pic and story
Sinkhole In One! Golfer Rescued From Pit
A golfer has had to be rescued from a sinkhole that swallowed him up at an Illinois fairway.
Mark Mihal was with three friends playing the 14th hole at Annbriar Golf Course near Waterloo last Friday.
But when the 43-year-old's buddies looked round he was nowhere to be seen.
They heard him moaning and followed the noise back to where he had been standing
"I felt the ground start to collapse and it happened so fast that I couldn't do anything," he said.
"I reached for the ground as I was going down and it gave way, too. It seemed like I was falling for a long time.
"The real scary part was I didn't know when I would hit bottom and what I would land on."
The fall had left him with a dislocated shoulder.
The pit that swallowed him up turned out to be 18ft deep and 10ft wide.
A ladder brought from the clubhouse was too short and Mark only had the use of one arm to pull himself up.
His friend Ed decided he would have to climb into the hole to get him out, spurred on by the recent death of a man in a Florida sinkhole.
"The thoughts of being buried alive were running through Mark's mind because of that horrifying story," Lori Mihal wrote.
"Dirt was falling on his head the whole time he was down below."
The mortgage broker from Creve Coeur, in neighbouring Missouri was eventually hoisted to safety with a rope and taken to a local hospital.
Although he still considers the course one of his favourites, he is having second thoughts about returning.
"It'd be kind of strange playing that hole again, for sure," he told the St Louis Post-Dispatch.