A girl died in a hole she dug on a beach in Florida.

On February 20, five-year-old Sloane Mattingly from Indiana died in Florida. She fell into a sand hole on the beach. Such pits are an underestimated danger. They kill several children a year across America, reports TheGuardian.

Photo: iStock.com/Abul Hossain Asif

Sloane Mattingly died on the afternoon of February 20 at Lauderdale-by-the-Sea beach when a 1-1,5 meter deep hole collapsed beneath her and her seven-year-old brother Maddox. The boy was buried up to his chest, but the girl was completely covered in sand. About 20 adults tried to dig it out - with their bare hands and with the help of plastic buckets - but the hole continued to deepen on its own.

Fighting sand and time

Lauderdale-by-the-Sea does not have lifeguards on the beach, so professionals were not able to immediately help the child. The first sheriff's deputies arrived about four minutes after the collapse, and paramedics and firefighters arrived a few minutes later.

"There's a little girl buried under the sand and they haven't gotten to her yet," one beachgoer told the 911 operator.

Another crying woman told the dispatcher: “There’s a whole group of men trying to dig, dig sand.”

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Sandra King, a spokeswoman for Pompano Beach Fire Rescue, said crews used shovels to dig out the sand and boards to stabilize the hole. But when they got to the girl, she no longer had a pulse. King said paramedics immediately began resuscitation procedures, but no miracle happened - doctors were forced to declare Sloan dead. The boy's condition is not known.

King said the children's parents are heartbroken.

“It was a terrible, terrible scene. Just imagine one minute your kids are playing in the sand and then seconds later you have a life-threatening situation where your little girl is buried alive,” King said.

An underestimated threat

A 2007 medical study shows that sand pits kill three to five children each year in the United States. They fall into a hole filled with sand, which is dug on the beach, in a park or at home. Other victims often require CPR to survive.

Recent cases include a 17-year-old who died in a hole on a North Carolina beach last year, a 13-year-old boy who died in a sand dune in a Utah state park, and an 18-year-old who was digging a hole with his sister. on the beach in New Jersey.

Lifeguards say parents need to be careful not to let their children dig too deep on the beach.

Patrick Bufford, manager of a rescue in Clearwater, Florida, says his staff warns families if a hole in the sand gets too big. But sometimes this is not noticed in time, and then the walls of the sand well collapse.

“We've had cases where people have had close calls or died because of the collapse,” he said. “You want kids to have fun, but there's a difference between having fun and the danger they might face. It's really hard for people to understand that the beach can be dangerous. Bad things can still happen no matter what. Use common sense."

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Sean DeRosa, who runs a rescue training firm, noted that "many people don't even think about the risks when they let children dig deep holes or wide tunnels."

“They know that sand tends to cave in and that a wall can simply collapse, but they don’t seem to realize that their child could fall into a sand trap so quickly,” Sean DeRosa said. “People don’t understand how difficult it is to pull a child out of collapsed sand.”

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