Miracle escape for couple as watery sinkhole swallows their car in Tampa, Florida

The car was removed from the water around 4am on Monday

A car plunged into a massive, watery sinkhole late Sunday evening - forcing the couple inside the vehicle to flee as it continued to be engulfed.

Ashley Guzman was with her boyfriend Christopher Atkinson when the incident took place at the intersection of North 20th Street and East Yukon Street in Tampa, Florida, she told WTVT.

'Right when I got out the car it just - like the floor just started cracking towards me,' she told the affiliate station. 'That's when I started panicking more and I started yelling at him so he could get out.'

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Guzman continued 'And the water, it just started flooding the whole street, it started going down, and after that the car just kept going down and it was just - I'm just very glad we didn't stay stuck in the car because if we would have stuck in the car it would have been real bad, you know?

'And I just thank god for that, that we actually, you know - we're good, we're not hurt or nothing. It's just the car.'

According to WFTS, it was slightly after 11pm when the hole opened due to a water main break - and the car was removed around 4am on Monday morning.

Guzman told the news outlet 'I started panicking, my legs were shaking real bad. I couldn't even talk to police on the phone. He was stuck still inside the car trying to back it up, trying to get it out, and he ended up having to get out.

'By the time he got out that's when the floor actually fell like how it is right now and the car just kept going deeper and deeper. At that moment we couldn't do nothing. We was just terrified.'

Guzman and Atkinson drove into the water, believing it to be surface water from a broken pipe - and the road sank when the vehicle traversed the intersection, WFTS reported. The couple told the station they ought to have turned the vehicle back instead.

'The neighbors around the streets was telling me that the water actually been running for three hours period to the time that the car accident happened,' Guzman told WFTS. She said there should have been a road block set up.

Police told the news outlet that they had gone through the neighborhood shortly ahead of the car's submersion.

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