Sydney family has 10 minutes to flee after front yard collapses: ‘If you look at the crater, it’s unreal’

More than 60,000 Sydney residents have been ordered to evacuate amid heavy downpour

A family in Sydney had just ten minutes to flee from their home after a chunk of their driveway collapsed in a dramatic landslide on Monday.

Rasleen Buksh, 41, of Emu Heights in the Blue Mountains escarpment, said she had noticed that two boulders situated in front of the house had rolled down the hill. But due to the intense rainfall in the region, she “did not think much of it”.

On Monday afternoon, she went out with her eldest daughter for about 30 minutes. She returned home around 2.45pm to a rude shock: the entire front yard, including the driveway, had caved in, creating a huge crater in front of the house.

“If you look at the crater it’s unreal,” Ms Buksh told news.com.au. “I am expecting an alien to crawl out of there.”

Her daughter called for emergency assistance and was told that they “had 10 minutes to get what you need and get out”.

The mother of four called her husband and directed their children to stay in the car while she ran inside to pack their belongings.

With the fire department honking outside, asking her to hurry up, Ms Buksh remembered things being “scary”.

“It’s scary. [The front yard] was still falling as we were standing there,” she said.

“It doesn’t feel real. Monday morning, everything was normal, I didn’t expect for it to be this big, to be honest,” she told Today Extra.

She recalled thinking about moving her car from the garage but was glad that she eventually didn’t. “I had no idea there was no soil underneath it, had I reversed my car I would have gone down with it.”

Now temporarily residing with relatives, Ms Buksh is outraged at a council engineer’s suggestion that the house is safe to return. “As we were standing there, chunks of land was falling out when the engineers said we were safe,” she said. “I said ‘If it’s your family in question, would you go in?’”

Having lived in the house for about a decade, Ms Buksh is hopeful that insurance claims will pull through, providing them with enough support to fix the home.

The incident comes as torrential rains and floods ravaged Sydney over the last few days, with Blue Mountains being declared a Natural Disaster Area.

As of Tuesday, the death toll in Australia rose to 20, after two more bodies were discovered in floodwaters in Sydney, reported Sky News. More than 60,000 Sydney residents were ordered to evacuate their homes amid heavy downpours.