Golfer rescused from sinkhole at Annbriar

    From Illinois Golfer News Services
    Writing from Waterloo, Illinois
    Mark Mihal couldn’t believe what was happening.
    He was on the par-5 14th hole at Annbriar Golf Course, playing on Friday, the first nice day of the late winter. He had hit a perfect drive on the 509-yard dogleg left.
    Suddenly, he was not on the 14th hole. He under the 14th hole.
    He was in a sinkhole. Mihal had fallen some 18 feet through a hole that opened up when his weight was what was needed to open the hole.
    Which, for all he knew, would further collapse, perhaps on top of him.
    “It looked like it was more room to go down,” Mihal, a 43-year-old mortgage broker from Creve Coeur, Mo., told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday. “I wasn’t too happy to be in there.”
    It took about 20 minutes to rescue Mihal, but that seemed like an eternity to him. It was barely a week earlier that a sinkhole in Florida killed a man who was in his bedroom. And much like the tragedy that took the life of Jeffrey Bush in Seffner, Fla., Mihal didn’t know if the hole was going to grow larger.
    “I felt the ground start to collapse and it happened so fast that I couldn’t do anything,” Mihal said in a report on golfmanna.com, a website he co-owns. “I reached for the ground and I was going down and it gave way, too. It seems 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.
    “Looking up, it appeared to be shaped like a bell.”
    That shape is not uncommon, said a geologist who inspected the site after Mihal was rescued.
    “It’s a gradual process that creates a void in the soil,” Phillip Moss explained to the Post-Dispatch. “Over time, (the void) migrates upward through the soil to where the soil arch gets too thin to support the weight of what’s over it, and it collapses.”
    The bedrock in much of southwestern Illinois is limestone, which can gradually erode over the years. Unless a major building is being constructed and deep caissons are needed to support it, nobody knows how deep the bedrock in a particular spot may be.
    Mihal suffered a dislocated shoulder when he hit the ground, complicating his rescue. A ladder reached 12 feet into the hole and was perched on a muddy shelf within it, but Mihal was another six feet down, and needed two good arms to pull himself up. Ed Magaletta, one of his golf partners, went down the ladder, then slid to the bottom. Magaletta tied his sweatshirt around Mihal’s shoulder to stabilize it, then put a rope around Mihal’s waist so he could be pulled out.
    Mike Peters had gotten to the hole, which wasn’t larger than a sewer cover, first.
    “Eddie, come over here, this is crazy,” Magaletta told Golfweek. “We couldn’t see him, we could only hear him yelling. Mike went crawling up to the hole, got as close as we felt was safe ... we were holding onto each other’s feet.”
    Magaletta, who has medical training, happened to have a flashlight, and quickly realized they couldn’t wait for rescuers, given Mihal’s injury and potential to go into shock.
    “We didn’t have time to think,” Magaletta said. “We were all frightened, thinking, ‘We’ve got to get him out of there.’ We wanted to protect him and get him back to safety.”
    Hank Martinez, the fourth member of the group, also assisted in the rescue.
    Annbrier general manager Russ Nobbe, called to the scene, said he thought when he got the call from someone in the foursome, “You’re trying to imagine where in the world there’s a sinkhole on 14.”
    Nobbe rushed to the hole with a ladder and rope. An ambulance was called as well. Mihal, out of the hole by the time the ambulance arrived, was treated and released from a local hospital. But those 20-odd minutes were the longest of his life.
    Wrote Mihal’s wife Lori on golfmanna.com, “Mark has always been claustrophobic. He was beginning to panic and was in shock; he was also in excruciating pain.
    “Mark and I had recently watched the news clip on the man in Florida who fell into a sinkhole while in his bedroom just last week. The thoughts of being buried alive were running through Mark’s mind because of that horrifying story. Dirt was falling on his head the whole time he was down below; his friends and the golf club staff knew that timing was everything and wanted to get him out as soon as possible.”
    Annbrier is located in Monroe County, which C. Plus Weibel, the senior geologist at the Illinois Geological Survey, called “the sinkhole capital of Illinois.”
    Tuesday, the Belleville News-Democrat reported that the U.S. Geological Survey had accounted for over 25 sinkholes within 500 feet of the golf course.
    Now there’s one more, the first on a golf course that opened 20 years ago.