A West Hempstead mother and daughter say they woke up Tuesday morning to find a 6-foot-deep sinkhole in their backyard.

"It's really scary," said West Hempstead resident Deborah Prince.

Deborah and her daughter, Tiffany, woke up Tuesday morning and saw a large sinkhole - 6 feet deep, 10 feet across - in the middle of their backyard. A cesspool company was on the scene repairing the damage.

"We get a couple of days of rain, the ground gets heavy, and many homes on Long Island have old block cesspools and dry wells built in the '60s and the '50s, and they deteriorate," said Joe Seibert, owner of Cesspool Pros LLC.

Town officials told Prince and her daughter this could have happened from a collapsed abandoned cesspool.

"We saw no signs of indentation on the lawn or anything. And to wake up and see something like that, oh my gosh, I almost had a heart attack. I was so scared," Prince said. She says it was a messy cleanup, but luckily no one was hurt.