Golfer survives sinkhole: A Missouri man survived falling into an 18-foot deep sinkhole while golfing.
A golfer survived falling to a sinkhole that opened while he was playing on a Illinois golf course, it was reported.
Mark Mihal, 43, of Missouri, was playing at Annbriar Golf Course near Waterloo, when he fell into the hole, suffering a dislocated shoulder, reported Fox News.
“I felt the ground start to collapse and it happened so fast that I couldn’t do anything,” Mihal was quoted as saying on Tuesday.
While golfing, Mihal and his friends noticed a depression on the 14th fairway of the course. When he tried to step on it, Mihal plunged 18 feet down into a sinkhole.
“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,” he told Fox.
His friends were able to get him to safety with a rope after around 20 minutes.
Mihal said that despite the injury, he still feels fortunate.
“I feel lucky just to come out of it with a shoulder injury, falling that far and not knowing what I was going to hit,” he told The Associated Press. “It was absolutely crazy.”
Several weeks ago, a sinkhole opened up underneath a home in Tampa, killing a man as he slept. And earlier this week, a sinkhole opened up in a woman’s driveway as she was walking her dog in Pennsylvania.
Russ Nobbe, a manager with the golf course, described the sinkhole—while unfortunate—as “an act of nature.”
“We don’t feel there is any way we could have foreseen this happening,” he said.
