Peaceful Beach or Sand Pit?

Jun 21, 08:05 AM

Current Headlines: From staff and wire reports

ATLANTA

Waves and sharks aren't the only dangers at the beach. More than two dozen young people have been killed over the past decade when sand holes collapsed on them, report father-and-son doctors who have made warning of the risk their personal campaign.

Since 1985, at least 20 children and young adults in the United States have died in beach or backyard sand submersions. And at least eight others died in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, according to a letter from the doctors published in this week's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

In April 2006, a 13-year-old boy from Huntingdon, Pa ., who tried to burrow a tunnel in the wet sand on Chesapeake Beach in Virginia Beach, Va., was found buried and unconscious after the sand collapsed. A passer-by with his dogs noticed the boy's legs poking out of the sand and dug him out.

And in 1997, a 21-year-old tourist from Woodbridge, Va., died on Cape Hatteras, N.C., when a gaping hole he had dug 9 feet into the sand collapsed and buried him.

Among the cases cited in the New England Journal was Matthew Gauruder, who died from a collapse at an after-prom beach party in Westerly, R.I., in May 2001. The 17-year-old was playing football with friends when he jumped for a pass and fell backward into an 8- foot-deep hole someone had dug earlier.

Would-be rescuers made the problem worse by caving in more sand as they tried to approach him. People at the scene said he may have been buried 15 minutes, said his mother, Mavis.

"People have no conception of how dangerous this is," she said in an interview this week.

Virginia Beach officials said sand collapses have not been a problem at the Oceanfront. People are allowed to build castles in the sand at the Oceanfront, but lifeguards do not allow anyone to dig a hole large enough for a person, said 1st Lt. Gary Felch of the Virginia Beach Lifesaving Office.

Sand-hole collapses occur horrifyingly fast, said Dr. Bradley Maron of Harvard Medical School, the report's lead author.

"Typically, victims became completely submerged in the sand when the walls of the hole unexpectedly collapsed, leaving virtually no evidence of the hole or location of the victim," wrote Maron, an internal medicine resident.

Maron, a former lifeguard, became interested in the topic in the summer of 1998. He was vacationing with his family on Martha's Vineyard when he and his father, Minnesota cardiologist Dr. Barry Maron, saw a lifeguard responding to a collapse that engulfed an 8- year-old girl.

The girl survived, thanks to a dramatic rescue. But it left a big impression on Maron, who's spent years tracking - and writing about - similar incidents.

"It's been almost like a vendetta for him," said Dennis Arnold, who runs the beach patrol in the Martha's Vineyard community of Edgartown and was Maron's boss that summer.

People naturally worry about splashier threats, like shark attacks. However, the Marons' research found there were 16 sand hole or tunnel deaths in the United States from 1990-2006, compared with 12 fatal shark for the same period, according to University of Florida statistics.

And Bradley Maron thinks the sand-related deaths are less well- documented than shark attacks.

The father and son based their report largely on news media accounts and Internet searches. Most of the incidents were from the past 10 years, when Internet reports were available.

Overall, they counted 31 recreational sand-hole deaths since 1985 in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. They counted an additional 21 incidents in which a person was rescued from a collapse, in several cases by bystanders who performed CPR.

The victims, mostly boys, ranged in age from 3 to 21 years, with the average age about 12.

This story was compiled from reports by The Associated Press and staff writer Jaedda Armstrong.

(c) 2007 Virginian - Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.