The 43-year-old mortgage broker was counting his blessings Tuesday and nursing a dislocated shoulder sustained four days earlier when he tumbled into an 18-foot deep sinkhole on the 14th hole of the Annbriar Golf Club near Waterloo, Ill., just southeast of St. Louis.

Friends managed to hoist Mihal to safety with a rope after about 20 minutes. But the experience gave him quite a fright, particularly following the much-publicized recent death of a man in Florida who died when his bedroom fell into a sinkhole. That man's body hasn't been found.

"I feel lucky just to come out of it with a shoulder injury, falling that far and not knowing what I was going to hit," Mihal, from the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur, told The Associated Press before heading off to learn whether he'll need surgery. "It was absolutely crazy."

Mihal said it was a real downer on what had been a fine outing.

With winter finally nearing an end, "it was the first day to get to play in a long time," he said. "So I wasn't expecting too much."

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Friday evening's storm at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport ripped away a large section of the main terminal's roof, forcing the airport to close indefinitely and diverting incoming flights to other cities.

Elsewhere around St. Louis, residents in suburbs were waking to damaged homes, fallen trees and downed power lines -- the remains of a fierce line of storms that moved through central and eastern Missouri.

"We have all hands on deck here," Mayor Francis Slay said at the airport. "This is something we're putting a lot of attention to."

But amid all the damage, there was relief that things could have been worse. Only four people with minor injuries were taken to the hospital from Lambert, while an unspecified number of others were treated at the scene for cuts blamed on flying glass.

"We're fortunate we didn't have larger (numbers) of injuries," said airport director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge.

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