July 6, 2024 – 4:52 PM
Beachgoers on Miami Beach – Photo: Jakub Borzycki/AFP
“Don’t dig a hole deeper than the knee height of the shortest vacationer,” advises vacationers Stephen P. Leatherman, a professor of coastal research at Florida International University who studies coastal areas. a He justified this in his article published in the Washington Post by saying that if the hole is deep enough and collapses on a person, it is very difficult to escape from it.
He writes that according to some research, more people die from drowning in the sand than from shark attacks. As an example, he cites the case in February when a 7-year-old girl died after her older brother dug a hole about 6 feet deep in the sand on a Florida beach, causing the sand to collapse on her and bury her alive. Firefighters were unable to save her.
Between 1997 and 2007, sand pit collapses killed 31 people in the United States, most of them children, 87 percent of them men, writes the coastal researcher, who details how difficult it is for rescuers to save someone drowning in the sand because of its weight, texture and the nature of the sand they must save.
As for sand, which is the twenty-first most important raw material in the century, we wrote about it in detail in this article.
