Mayday! Danielle Tammone Took an Eight-Foot Birthday Rabbit-Hole Drop
Mayday, mayday! No, it’s not Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. However, it tis Danielle Tammone suddenly dropping about eight feet into the ground in her very own Long Island backyard.
And because the universe apparently enjoys a dramatic calendar detail, it happened on her 47th birthday.
Tammone was outside her home in Bohemia, Long Island, on Thursday, September 17, when she felt the earth beneath her begin to move. Within seconds, she was down in a narrow hole surrounded by water, sod, stone and brick. She later described the whole thing as happening so quickly that she barely had time to process what was going on before she was underground.
survival
A backyard walk turned into an eight-foot drop.
Danielle Tammone’s birthday took a wild turn when the ground opened beneath her in Bohemia, Long Island — leaving neighbors to follow her screams and call for help.
Some links may be affiliate links. INYIM may earn from qualifying purchases.
At first, even Tammone wasn’t sure exactly what she had fallen into. She told CBS New York she didn’t know whether it was an old water well, cesspool or sump. News 12 Long Island described it as appearing to be an old well. So while plenty of headlines have understandably reached for “sinkhole,” the exact underground structure has not been definitively nailed down in the reporting.
What was very clear was the danger. Tammone tried to position herself to climb out, but the stone and earth around her were crumbling. With sections of ground hanging above her, she feared trying to scramble upward could bring even more material down on top of her.
“People suffocate and they die, so I thought that at first,” she later told CBS New York. At one point the birthday thought hit in the darkest possible way: “It’s my birthday. This might be my death date.”
So she did the one thing she could do: she screamed and kept screaming.
Her dog, Daisy, remained nearby while two neighbors — Maggie and Christine — eventually heard the cries. The problem? They initially couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. Neighbor Christine Chanowsky said they were looking around the property before realizing they needed to look down.
The opening was reportedly only about a foot wide at the surface. Chanowsky said she could see Tammone’s shoes nearby while hearing her cries from below — one of those details that makes the whole scene feel even more unreal.
Neighbors called 911, and responding officers grabbed a ladder from a nearby garage to get her back above ground. Tammone estimated she had been trapped for around 30 minutes.
Somehow, after an eight-foot surprise plunge on her birthday, the physical damage was limited. Tammone initially said she felt fine because she landed in soft sod and water rather than directly on stone; later reporting said she was dealing with whiplash and pulled muscles. First responders even gave the birthday girl a rendition of “Happy Birthday” once the ordeal was over.
Before her neighbors came to the rescue, this had all the makings of a very different ending. Instead, Danielle got one helluva birthday story — and perhaps permanent permission to inspect every inch of that backyard before thee next casual stroll.
Click play on thee astonishing captured backyard footage below as Ms. Tammone gives a detail-by-detail account of how an ordinary walk across her lawn suddenly became an eight-foot drop underground.
Danielle Tammone Recounts Her Eight-Foot Long Island Backyard Fall
The report features footage from the Bohemia backyard rescue and Tammone describing the frightening moments after the ground gave way beneath her.
Source: News 12 Long Island; CBS New York; Inside Edition.
