New York woman feared she’d be ‘buried alive’ on her birthday after 8ft hole opened in her back garden
A 47th birthday in Bohemia, New York, nearly ended in tragedy this week when the ground beneath a woman's feet gave way without warning, dropping her eight feet into a crumbling backyard cesspool.
Danielle Tammone was in her own yard on Thursday when the earth simply opened up.
Within seconds, she'd gone from standing on solid ground to trapped underground, screaming for help as her golden retriever, Daisy, watched on in visible distress.
"It happened so quickly, my feet just sunk a little bit, but it was like seconds. I didn't even have time," Tammone told 1010 WINS, the outlet that first captured the ordeal.
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The fall itself took only moments, but the aftermath left Tammone disoriented and fighting panic in the darkness of the pit. 'Okay… what just happened?' she recalled asking herself. 'Like, where am I? Alright I'm in the ground. You're in a hole, wow.'
How did rescuers find her in the backyard?
It was two neighbors, people Tammone said she'd never actually met before that day, who heard her cries and sprinted over to help. Backyard footage obtained by 1010 WINS shows the pair racing across the lawn, one shouting reassurance while the other called for emergency services.
'Oh my God, she fell into the ground,' one neighbor can be heard saying in the clip, before adding that they were already on the phone with 911. "You're going to be fine, Danielle. They are on their way," the other told her.
The neighbors instructed Tammone to keep making noise so rescuers could pinpoint her exact location, a detail that proved critical given how easily the hole could be mistaken for empty ground. "At first, we thought she was in the shed or something. We were not looking on the ground," neighbor Christine Chanowsky told CBS News.
As the panic set in, Tammone's mind went to the worst-case scenario. 'And then the panic starts, because you're like wow I could die today. This could not end well. I could be buried alive,' she said.
What caused the hole to open up?
The culprit was an old, partially collapsed stone cesspool hidden beneath the lawn, with sod hanging precariously over the opening as Tammone remained trapped inside. It has not been confirmed whether the pit contained any sewage at the time of the collapse.
Emergency crews arrived and pulled Tammone from the pit using a ladder after what she described as a tense, ten-minute wait. Chanowsky said the sense of relief once Tammone was finally free was overwhelming. "Firemen, cops, ambulance, special unit, EMTs, they were wonderful," she said.
"I was tearing up. I was crying. As soon as she got out of the hole, just gave her the biggest hug."
Tammone, who works as a physical therapist, escaped the frightening fall largely unscathed and was even treated to an unexpected gesture from her rescuers once she was back on solid ground. 'And they all sang happy birthday to me. It was great,' she said.
Thomas Bamford