‘It’s Gone.’ Video Captures Family’s Florida Home Being Swallowed by Sinkhole

A Florida family watched on Tuesday as a sinkhole swallowed their home, leaving generations of cherished belongings buried under rubble.

Ellen Miller and her husband Garry Miller were able to evacuate their longtime home in Apopka, Fla. early Tuesday morning after they noticed the walls in their house were beginning to break down, according to News 6 WKMG and the Orlando Sentinel.

“I wasn’t sure what all the sounds were until I got up and saw the big, huge cracks in the walls, and they were just enormous,” Ellen Miller, 69, told News 6. “It’s the only home I’ve ever had.”

Relatives quickly helped the couple rescue some of their belongings from the home they lived in for 49 years. But many items, like their original weddings rings, couldn’t be saved in time, the Sentinel reported.

By about 9 a.m., the family was sitting nearby on lawn chairs, watching at least half of their three-bedroom house fall apart. A video that the Millers’ granddaughter, Elena Hale, took and shared with News 6 shows a large portion of the house suddenly collapsing into the sinkhole.

Hale told News 6 she was “kind of numb and trying to figure out if it’s going to stop growing.” On Tuesday, the sinkhole was about 25 feet wide and 15 feet deep.

“I don’t have any idea what’s next,” Ellen Miller told the news station. “I really don’t. There’s no rebuilding it. It’s gone.”