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 CNN HEALTH, June 22, 2007ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- Waves and sharks aren't the only dangers at the beach. More than two dozen young people have been killed over the last decade when sand holes collapsed on them, report father-and-son doctors who have made warning of the risk their personal campaign. (Seriously...) 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. (See. It's science.) Among them was Matthew Gauruder, who died from a collapse at an after-prom beach party in Westerly, Rhode Island, in May 2001. The 17-year-old was playing football with friends when he jumped for a pass and fell backward into an eight-foot-deep hole someone had dug earlier. (Well, that was caused by someone, so that does not count. What we are trying to tell you is that the Universe is pernicious and out to get you.) 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. (Mavis is not a mining and engineer and neither was any of the other drunken teenagers who only made matters worse.) "People have no conception of how dangerous this is," she said in an interview this week. (That is not the only thing that "people" [fallacy of the unnamed collective} have no idea about. But, we'lll let that go for now...) 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. (Edgar Allen Poe said it much better.) Overall, they counted 31 recreational sand hole deaths since 1985 in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. They counted another 21 incidents in which a person was rescued from a collapse, in several cases by bystanders who performed CPR. (The horror! The horror!) The victims, mostly boys, ranged in age from 3 to 21 years, with the average age about 12. (Well, yes, 3 + 21 = 24 and 24 over 2 is 12... But what does that tell us about the event. DId you hear about the statistician who drowned in a river with a median depth of 19 cm?) On Martha's Vineyard, lifeguards are instructed to order children and adults out of any hole deeper than a child's waist, and to kick sand in to fill them, Arnold said. (And they say capitalists are risk-takers. Ah! I see: rich people and capitalists are not the same thing. Got it!) Mavis Gauruder, who lives in Fort Mill, South Carolina, said she's tried to issue similar warnings, like the time she came upon a father digging a hole with a garden shovel for his young son. She went up to the pair and warned them of the dangers. The man seemed unmoved, so she finally told him she'd had a tragedy in her family involving a hole collapse. "I asked them to fill in the hole. They did, but they looked at me like I was interfering," she said. ( The prosecution rests.) You think I'm kidding? http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/20/sand.deaths.ap/index.html | ||||
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