Sinkhole Survivor: 'All Of A Sudden....I Was Underground'

A Creve Coeur man who reportedly is claustrophobic is recovering this week after falling into a sinkhole Friday at Annbriar Golf Course in Waterloo, IL.

Here's how Lori Mihal decribed what happened to her husband Mark Mihal, courtesy of golfmanna.com, a website he co-founded:

He was having a great round and lots of laughs with his buddies. They were in the fairway on No. 14; Mark had already hit his second shot when he went to check out the distance for his playing partner, Mike Peters, who was getting ready to hit. Mike had his back to Mark and when he turned to say something to him, Mark was gone. 
Mike could hear Mark moaning and ran in the direction where he had been standing just a few seconds earlier. It was immediately clear what had happened; the ground had caved in and Mark had fallen into the earth – 18 feet underground. 
“I felt the ground start to collapse and it happened so fast that I couldn’t do anything,” Mark said later. “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.” 

Lori said her huband was in excruciating pain and in shock. She writes that she got the call at her work telling her what had happened, after a friend had gone down into the hole to rescue Mark. 

The couple had just been watching scenes from Seffner, FL, where a man was presumed dead after a sinkhole opened up in the middle of his home.

Mihal suffered a dislocated shoulder. His voicemail at USA Mortgage said he'll be out of the office for a few days.

He talked to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the ordeal. “I was standing in the middle of the fairway,” Mihal told the paper.“Then, all of a sudden, before I knew it, I was underground.”

He appears to be thinking long and hard about returning to the course, telling the Associated Press, "I would have a tough time probably walking down that hole again.”

FOX2 has a photo gallery from the scene

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