Teen dies from sand hole collapse in North Carolina

The 17-year-old male died Saturday afternoon within the small resort city of Frisco, which sits alongside the Cape Hatteras Nationwide Seashore on the Outer Banks, the Nationwide Park Service mentioned in a press release.

Park rangers responded to a 911 name relating to a teen trapped in a gap that was dug in a back-dune space behind the seaside’s major dune alongside the Atlantic Ocean, the park service mentioned. {The teenager} was buried beneath a number of ft of sand after an adjoining dune apparently collapsed into the opening.

Rangers and different emergency responders labored with members of the family to rescue the teenager whereas concurrently performing CPR, the park service mentioned. Efforts to revive the teenager, who lived in Chesapeake, Virginia, failed.

“We urge guests to not dig deep holes on the seaside as a result of hazard they current to beachgoers and emergency response workers,” the park service mentioned in a press release on Saturday.

Mike Barber, a park service spokesman, instructed The Related Press Monday that the incident remained beneath investigation and that no new info was accessible.

Collapsing sand holes have claimed dozens of lives over the a long time. The load of the sand makes it troublesome for folks to breathe, whereas the sand can enter folks’s lungs. The mind and different organs are sometimes disadvantaged of oxygen.

In late March, a 14-year-old boy died after being buried in a sand gap in a rural space of Minnesota. Wabasha County Sheriff Rodney Bartsh mentioned Hunter Flaxbeard’s loss of life has been dominated an unintentional suffocation.

In Could 2022, a 13-year-old Utah boy died after a sand dune he was digging a tunnel into collapsed and buried him at southern Utah’s Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park.

Throughout that very same month, an 18-year-old man died whereas enjoying together with his sister at a seaside in Toms River, New Jersey, when a big gap they had been digging within the sand collapsed. His sister was additionally trapped however was rescued. The household was visiting from Maine.

In 2014, a Fredericksburg, Virginia, man died at Salvo, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, when sand collapsed on high of him after authorities mentioned he was tunnelling between two holes.

These are simply a number of the examples. In 2007, Dr Bradley Maron and his father, Dr Barry Maron, co-authored a letter to the New England Journal of Medication that cited 31 leisure sand gap deaths since 1985 in the USA, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

They counted one other 21 incidents wherein an individual was rescued from a collapse, in a number of instances by bystanders who carried out CPR.

Bradley Maron instructed The Related Press in 2007 that he thought the sand-related deaths had been much less well-documented than shark assaults.

The Marons’ analysis discovered there have been 16 sand gap or tunnel deaths within the US from 1990 to 2006 in contrast with 12 deadly shark assaults for a similar interval, in response to College of Florida statistics.

The daddy and son primarily based their report largely on information media accounts and web searches. A lot of the incidents had been from the final 10 years, when Web reviews had been accessible.

The victims, principally boys, ranged in age from 3 to 21 years, with the common age being about 12.

Maron and others advise the general public to not let younger children play in sand unattended, and to not get in a gap deeper than your knees.

David Elder, ocean rescue director for the city of Kill Satan Hills on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, mentioned he finds massive holes which were dug within the sand a number of occasions a month.

Generally he’ll encounter folks on the seaside whereas they’re digging them. Their reactions to his explanations of the hazards vary from, “We perceive and we’ll care for it” to “I didn’t even take into consideration that.”

These conversations about sand holes aren’t a lot totally different than those he has with beachgoers about rip currents and extreme warmth situations.

“It is sadly one of many jobs I’ve to do,” he mentioned.