SAINT-JUDE, Que. — Rescue crews continued to search for a missing family of four, whose clapboard farmhouse was swallowed by a giant sinkhole that opened up in the pastoral farmland on the banks of the Yamaska River, northeast of Montreal Monday night.
By early Tuesday, there were unconfirmed reports the Prefontaine family — father Richard, his wife and two children — were in the basement of their rural home when the earth opened up and engulfed their home.
Herman Gagnon, who lived on the neighbouring hill to the Prefontaines, said he heard a load groan about 9 p.m. and thought there had been an earthquake.
The noise came from his basement, so he went to check his pipes. They were fine. Gagnon got on the phone with a neighbour, who had also heard the mysterious sound.
Then he jumped in his car and drove from his home toward the town of St. Jude. Between Gagnon's home and the Prefontaine's, there is normally a narrow creek and a bridge. But as he descended the hill and started to crest the other side where the family of four lives, he said he was stopped in his tracks.
In front of him lay "a different kind of blackness," Gagnon recounted yesterday, at a security perimeter erected two kilometres from the sight of the sinkhole.
Gagnon has stopped at the edge of a giant precipice and found himself staring into the abyss.
Another resident lingering at the roadside barriers, who declined to give his name, said sinkholes and landslides are common in this area of southern Quebec, about 77 kilometres from Montreal.
He blamed "blue glaze" a very soft type of clay that lines the banks of the Yamaska River.
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