Fla. sinkhole gets bigger amid concerns swallowed man dead, house could collapse

AP

Jeff Bush's family and friends hug outside of the house where a sinkhole swallowed Bush in his bedroom.

SEFFNER, Fla. — Engineers worked gingerly Saturday to find out more about a slowly growing sinkhole that swallowed a Florida man in his bedroom, believing the entire house could eventually succumb to the unstable ground.

Jeff Bush, 37, was in his bedroom Thursday night when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five other people were in the house but managed to escape unharmed. Bush's brother jumped into the hole to try to help, but he had to be rescued himself by a sheriff's deputy.

AP

Jeff Bush

On Saturday, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokesman Ronnie Rivera said one of the homes next door to the Bush house also was compromised by the sinkhole, as determined through testing. The family, which had evacuated Friday, would be allowed to go inside for about a half-hour to gather belongings, Rivera said. The family was outside, crying and organizing boxes.

PHOTOS: INCREDIBLE FLORIDA SINKHOLES

Engineers had been testing since 7 a.m. Saturday. By 10 a.m., officials moved media crews farther away from the Bush house so experts could perform tests on the home across the street.

It's unclear how large the sinkhole is or whether it leads to other caverns and chasms throughout the neighborhood. Experts say the underground of West Central Florida looks similar to Swiss cheese, with the geography lending itself to sinkholes.

Experts spent the previous day on the property, taking soil samples and running various tests — while acknowledging that the entire lot where Bush lay entombed was dangerous. No one was allowed in the home.

"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. "This is a chasm. For that reason, we're being very deliberate."

Officials delicately addressed another sad reality: Bush was likely dead and the family wanted his body. Merrill, though, said they didn't want to jeopardize any more lives.

"They would like us to go in quickly and locate Mr. Bush," Merrill said. Officials added Saturday morning that a fund had been set up to help the families affected by the sinkhole.

On Saturday, Jeremy Bush — who tried to rescue his brother when the earth opened — lay flowers and a stuffed lamb near the house and wept.

Hillsborough County Fire Chief Ron Roger called the situation "very complex."

"It's continuing to evolve, and the ground is continuing to collapse," he said.

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," Taylor Yarkosky, a sinkhole expert from Brooksville, Fla., 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 400 feet 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.

The sinkhole, estimated at 20 feet across and 20 feet deep, caused the home's concrete floor to cave in around 11 p.m. Thursday 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 Friday in a neighbor'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. Duvall said he didn't see anyone else in the hole.

As he pulled Bush out, "everything was sinking," 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," Bush said.

AP

Engineers talk in front of Jeff Bush's home, where a sinkhole opened up underneath his bedroom and swallowed him Thursday night.

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Tom Hudson: China’s new leaders plan quiet transition

If everything goes smoothly, you won’t hear much out of China in the new week. And that’s the way its new leaders want it. Even though the world’s second largest economy officially seats a new president and premier, the beginning of China’s parliamentary session on Tuesday comes without the usual pomp and circumstance. Instead, China’s new leaders hope to show their own version of austerity. For instance, there will be no booze at official meals.

The party leaders want a sober beginning to their terms as the hope for a more sober Chinese economy. They want to avoid any significant pronouncements that could threat China’s gentle economic recovery. The country’s biggest trading partner, Europe, continues to struggle, tensions with Japan have been rising and Chinese workers have been demanding (and in some cases getting) pay raises. Chinese home prices have heated up again as the Beijing government moved late last year to stimulate its economy.

It came after China’s economy grew at its slowest pace in 13 years. The new government knows that its political stability depends upon a steady economy. With choking air pollution, a horrendous record on food safety and sanctioned corruption, the new slate of leaders taking their seats this week would like to reduce China’s reliance on exports to fuel its economic expansion, reassure its trading partners it wants to play fair and stoke a steady and sustainable rise of living standards.

Since early December as the stimulus efforts began, the Shanghai Stock Exchange index has shot up 21 percent. Electricity production is rising and manufacturing has rebounded too. But the political volume has been muted.

Tom Hudson is a financial journalist based in Miami. He is the former co-anchor and managing editor of Nightly Business Report on public television.

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Near-record warm winter for South Florida

Winter won’t officially be over for a few weeks but it’s already been a near-record warm one in South Florida – not including the cold front rolling through this weekend.

From December through February, Miami recorded the third warmest winter on record, the National Weather Service’s Miami office reported Friday. The average temperature of 72.3 degrees was 2.7 degrees warmer than normal.

Fort Lauderdale and Naples recorded the fifth warmest winters and West Palm Beach the ninth.

In Miami and Fort Lauderdale, November 2012 actually wound up colder than any of the three following winter months, the Weather Service said – something that has happened only twice since 1910.

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Beyonce Isabel Marant Exotic Skins Sneakers

Well here's one organization not feeling all the post-Super Bowl Beyonce love -- PETA, who's calling out the superstar for her new Isabel Marant wedge sneakers. ET can confirm that the exclusive sneakers are made out of crocodile and anaconda skins along with stingray, ostrich and calf hair.

"These custom-made kicks come with a high price -- and it's paid by the various animals who were beaten and skinned alive or cruelly farmed and killed. Although most people aren't as familiar with the types of animals (snakes, stingrays, crocodiles, and ostriches) killed for this single pair of sneakers as they are with the cats and dogs we share our homes with, these animals are highly sensitive living beings who try hard to avoid capture and suffer enormously when trapped, netted, speared, and skinned alive," PETA says in a statement. "We hope that Beyoncé will choose to wear more clothes from her own clothing line -- which features faux fur -- and that one day, she'll go completely cruelty-free. She can always choose the cruelty-free and 'green' fashion favored by compassionate, chic celebrities such as Natalie Portman and Anne Hathaway and designers such as award-winning fashion queen Stella McCartney."

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The shoes in question are custom designed by PMK, which explains the conception behind the design of the "King Bey" sneakers on its website.

"Summoned by King Bee and given the task to create a custom design worthy of her approval, PMK takes the Isabel Marant sneaker wedge back to the beginning of time and gives it what they call the Eden treatment. A hybrid of land and sea skins are used to create this handcrafted creation. Stingray, Ostrich, calfs fur, Crocodile, and Anaconda give the already impeccable design attitude and the tones of white mixed with gold stitched details produces a feeling of elegance, mimicking the southern belle’s sweet and fierce persona."

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The original Isabel Marant wedge sneakers -- sans the exotic skins -- have been a celeb favorite, worn by the likes of Anne Hathaway, Kate Bosworth and Gisele Bundchen. Beyonce herself wore an all-black suede version in the music video for her hit single Love on Top. Isabel Marant wedge sneakers retail for approximately $660 a pair.

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Families at Long Beach elementary schools getting $1,000 each in Sandy aid from Cantor Fitzgerald

The Long Island town of Long Beach was hit hard by Superstorm Sandy. Now families at the town's five elementary schools are getting $1,000 each in storm relief from the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick announced in January that the firm would give a total of $10 million to families in 19 schools affected by Sandy.

As part of the effort, Lutnick and other Cantor officials were in Long Beach on Friday to distribute $1,000 debit cards to 1,350 families there.

Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees when the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

The firm set up a relief fund to help the surviving families of its employees. The fund now supports others in need.

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Florida class-action case takes aim at Citizens’ reinspection program

Thousands of Florida homeowners buffeted by higher windstorm premiums have sued state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corp. to recover potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in “back-door” rate increases driven by “arbitrary” reinspections of their residences.

The proposed class-action lawsuit, filed in Broward Circuit Wednesday, aims to halt Citizens’ reinspection program, claiming it has illegally stripped discounts from homeowners who had earned them under a 2007 inspection program approved by the Florida Legislature. Their original inspections were supposed to be valid for five years.

But in 2010, Citizens violated the due-process rights of homeowners, who had submitted official inspection forms, by arbitrarily reinspecting their properties to boost lost revenue that the agency could not generate lawfully through premium hikes, the suit said.

Lawyers who filed the suit, whose class representative is a Broward homeowner, said Citizens violated the due-process rights of its policyholders, costing each higher premiums averaging upwards of $1,000 — and possibly more — a year.

The collective cost to homeowners throughout Florida exceeds more than $100 million, said attorney Todd Stabinksi, whose Miami law firm, Stabinksi & Funt, filed the suit with Farmer, Jaffe of Fort Lauderdale and Kula & Samson of Aventura. They gathered Thursday for a press conference outside the West Broward County Courthouse in Plantation.

“Citizens got the benefit of lowering their risks, but Citizens’ policyholders did not get the benefit of lower premiums,” Stabinski said. “It should have been a mutually beneficial bargain.”

Consumer advocates have accused Citizens of using the reinspection program to impose “massive” rate hikes on homeowners. Citizens has denied the charge, saying that it is simply trying to get accurate information about the homes it insures.

“Since at least 2010, Citizens has used a wind mitigation reinspection program to systemtically deprive policy holders of legitimate wind mitigation credits,” said a nonprofit group, Florida Association for Insurance Reform, which praised the legal action.

A spokesperson for Citizens said the company has been operating under the law, and that the reinspections came after regulators changed the mitigation criteria. “Our position is Citizens’ reinspections were conducted under statutory authority afforded any insurer to verify, at the insurer’s expense, the accuracy of inspection reports submitted for a mitigation discount,” said spokesman Michael Peltier.

Discontent has been widespread among Citizens’ policyholders, who spent large sums of money on roof, window and other upgrades to earn windstorm mitigation discounts while protecting their homes against potential hurricane damage. In response, Citizens unveiled major changes to its home reinspection program last August, after consumers expressed outrage over media reports about a staggering $137 million in premium increases generated by the unpopular program.

Under its new plans, homeowners who lose insurance discounts because of a reinspection can receive a second inspection free of charge. They will have new tools to dispute the findings of the first reinspection. That decision could impact more than 200,000 property owners, who have already seen their premiums go up by an average of about $800 after the initial reinspection.

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Would-be convention center developers make pitches to Miami Beach residents

Developers on Wednesday presented Miami Beach residents with competing ideas for what the city’s Convention Center could look like after an overhaul.

It was the public’s first glimpse of what could become of the 52-acre site. Two heavy-hitting teams are competing for the project, which could cost up to $1 billion.

Both teams – Portman-CMC and South Beach ACE – stressed that the concepts presented Wednesday were only preliminary ideas.

Both teams’ proposals focus on creating lush greenscapes and ways to connect the enormous convention center with abutting neighborhoods – things that residents at a prior public meeting asked of the developers.

To do that, Portman-CMC, the team led by Portman Holdings, proposed several scenarios. In one, a diagonal plaza would grace the corner of the current convention center property, creating a string of parks to connect the center to the existing Miami Beach Botanical Garden and SoundScape Park.

The design focused on creating shade through both the buildings and landscaping, which is basically nonexistent now.

“This place is a black hole in terms of green, in terms of trees. We aim to change that," said Jamie Maslyn Larson, a Partner of West 8, the company partnering with Portman to landscape the project.

West 8 also worked on Miami Beach’s SoundScape Park, which features free outdoor movies and audio and video feeds of performances at the adjoining New World Symphony.

South Beach ACE, the team led by Tishman Hotel and Realty, proposed an underground parking area to hide idling trucks and buses – an issue that residents have complained about. Above the parking lot would be a rolling greenspace, and views of the now-ignored Collins Canal would be incorporated.

World-renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, part of the South Beach ACE team, called the current convention center a "serious problem" in the middle of the "idyllic" Miami Beach. His team’s design aims to correct that.

Tishman’s proposal also preserves the current Jackie Gleason Theater. Residents have debated whether the theater, which is not deemed historic, deserves to be preserved. The Tishman proposal would essentially remove a back wall of the theater to create a two-stage amphitheater.

Portman-CMC has not made a decision about whether the theater itself would stay, but spoke to preserving the legacy of Gleason himself. The team launched a website to get more resident feedback about its proposal: www.portmancmcmiamibeach.com.

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Behind the Scenes Jennifer Lawrence Dior Campaign

Nobody doubts Hollywood golden girl Jennifer Lawrence's award-winning acting chops, but in case you forgot, she's quite the fashionista too -- Jennifer's first ads for Miss Dior were related earlier this week to universal critical acclaim, and now this behind-the-scenes video gives us a look at how the beautiful photos came about.

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"Dior represents beauty and strength and women -- and that's how I feel when I'm wearing his clothes," Jennifer says as she artfully poses for photographer Willy Vanderperre. "It just makes you feel so confident."

....No doubt she was thinking that during her surprisingly graceful fall on Oscar night.

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Click the video for a glimpse at J. Law's modeling skills, and how she feels about being part of such an iconic brand, which has been represented by the likes of Charlize Theron, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.

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Violent homeless crowd attacking patrons at Think Coffee shop

A violent homeless crowd is plaguing a popular Chelsea coffee shop — repeatedly attacking customers and each other with chairs and tables, the store’s management said.

Think Coffee manager Matt Fury told cops yesterday that he’s concerned with a lack of police response to his company’s 8th Avenue location, near 14h Street, where 911 calls are constant.

“One [homeless person] has thrown a chair once, one has hit someone, one has thrown a table,” Fury, 40, told NYPD brass yesterday at a Sixth Precinct community meeting.

“It always ends in violence.”

Christian Johnston

Think Coffee.

The manager said sometimes, when he called police, NYPD either didn’t respond or officers at the scene didn’t “take the matter seriously.”

“We opened a year ago and the problems started immediately, where different people who hang out on the corner started asking for ice, asking for cups,” Fury said.

“But as we became less tolerant they became more aggressive about not wanting to leave,” he added. “We are really surprised at how often the [911] calls were just not answered. I went to the precinct and the cop at the desk showed me the list of 19 unanswered calls.”

Several patrons and homeless people have been taken away in ambulances, according to Fury.

“One time the police officer said he would arrest me if I didn’t stop bothering him,” he charged.

The precinct’s commander, Deputy Inspector Brandon Delpozo, acknowledged the homeless community near Think Coffee has been problematic.

He added his officers are working to control the situation.

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Don’t get too personal on LinkedIn

Have you ever received a request to connect on LinkedIn from someone you didn’t know or couldn’t remember?

A few weeks ago, Josh Turner encountered this situation. The online request to connect came from a businessman on the opposite coast of the United States. It came with a short introduction that ended with “Let’s go Blues!” a reference to Turner’s favorite hockey team in St. Louis that he had mentioned in his profile. “It was a personal connection … that’s building rapport.”

LinkedIn is known for being the professional social network where members expect you to keep buttoned-down behavior and network online like you would at a business event. With more than 200 million registered users, the site facilitates interaction as a way to boost your stature, gain a potential customer or rub elbows with a future boss.

But unlike most other social networking sites, LinkedIn is all about business — and you need to take special care that you act accordingly. As in any workplace, the right amount of personal information sharing could be the foot in the door, say experts. The wrong amount could slam it closed.

“Anyone in business needs a professional online presence,’’ says Vanessa McGovern, the VP of Business Development for the Global Institute for Travel Entrepreneurs and a consultant to business owners on how to use LinkedIn. But they should also heed LinkedIn etiquette or risk sending the wrong messages.

One of the biggest mistakes, McGovern says is getting too personal — or not personal enough.

Sending a request to connect blindly equates to cold calling and likely will lead nowhere. Instead, it should come with a personal note, an explanation of who you are, where you met, or how the connection can benefit both parties, McGovern explains.

Your profile should get a little personal, too, she says. “Talk about yourself in the first person and add a personal flair — your goals, your passion … make yourself seem human.”

Beyond that, keep your LinkedIn posts, invitations, comments and photos professional, McGovern says.

If you had a hard day at the office or your child just won an award, you may want to share it with your personal network elsewhere — but not on LinkedIn.

“This is not Facebook. Only share what you would share at a professional networking event,” she says.

Another etiquette pitfall on LinkedIn is the hit and run — making a connection and not following up.

At least once a week, Ari Rollnick, a principal in kabookaboo, an integrated marketing agency in Coral Gables, gets a request to connect with someone on LinkedIn that he has never met or heard of before. The person will have no connections in common and share no information about why they want to build a rapport.

“I won’t accept. That’s a lost opportunity for them,” Rollnick says.

He approaches it differently. When Rollnick graduated from Emory with an MBA in 2001, he had a good idea that his classmates would excel in the business world. Now, Rollnick wanted to find out just where they went and reestablish a connection.

With a few clicks, he tracked down dozens of them on LinkedIn, requested a connection, and was back on their radar. Then came the follow-up — letting them know through emails, phone calls and posts that he was creating a two-way street for business exchange. “Rather than make that connection and disappearing , I let them know I wanted to open the door to conversation.”

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