The Number: $200 Million: The New Yorker "I ran toward my brother's bedroom because I heard my brother scream," Jeremy Bush told CNN about a month ago. Everything was gone. My brother's bed, my brother's dresser, my brother's TV. My brother was gone. Thirty-six-year-old Jeffrey Bush had been swallowed on February 28th by a sinkhole that eventually grew to be about sixty feet deep. In the words of David Owen, who recently wrote about "Florida's Swiss-cheese geology" in The New Yorker, the foundation of Jeffrey and Jeremy's suburban Tampa home gave way "as though it had been punched with a cookie cutter," leaving Jeffrey dead. On Tuesday, authorities released raw video footage of the chasm. "Go inside the Florida sinkhole that swallowed man alive," urged Pittsburgh's WPXI TV station; "SINKHOLE BEDROOM VIDEO," the Hollywood Gossip declared, veering away from its usual hairstyles-and-weddings coverage: "REVEALED! The fascination with sinkholes may be new, but the problem isn't. In 1981, an article in the Times described how tourists overran the four-hundred-foot-wide Winter Park sinkhole, which had caused an estimated two million dollars" worth of damage. "It's died down some, but they come in a steady stream day and night," a policeman said. "You should see it at 2 A.M. when all the bars close." But for all their ability to turn both sober and inebriated heads - the policeman said he had arrested a twenty-one-year-old "who jumped in the sinkhole "to see what it was like" " - how common, really, are Florida's sinkholes, and how much damage do they do? Some answers come from some of the people who care most: Florida's sinkhole-insurance providers. At a regulatory hearing last September, the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, which, as Florida's largest property insurer, is responsible for nearly 1.3 million policies, stated that from 2007 to 2011 sinkholes had cost the company nearly a billion dollars, or roughly two hundred million dollars a year. Citizens had previously reported that the frequency of claims more than doubled between 2006 and 2009, perhaps because of the depletion of aquifers that help keep surface soil in place. Sinkhole claims in Hernando, Pasco, and Hillsborough counties - the three counties that make up the state's "Sinkhole Alley," and the third of which swallowed Jeffrey Bush several weeks ago - increased, respectively, by three hundred and seventy-five per cent, a hundred and eighty-seven per cent, and three hundred and eighty-four per cent. Illustration by Larry Buchanan.