A 5-year-old girl died Tuesday on a beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when the deep hole she was digging with her brother collapsed on the two children in the middle of a sunny afternoon.
“It was an unfathomable accident,” Sandra King, spokesperson for the Pompano Beach Fire Department, told the Miami Herald on Tuesday shortly after the incident.
A family’s peaceful afternoon enjoying the sun on a Lauderdale-by-the-Sea beach took a dramatic turn around 3:15 p.m. when the 5-foot-6 hole dug by two children of 5 and 7 years old would have closed in on himself, reported NBC 6 Miami.
The two children would then have found themselves buried in the ground, the boy up to his chest and the little girl stuck even deeper.
According to images from a witness reported by NBC 6, many people immediately came to the rescue of the two children by digging the ground in search of the 5-year-old girl, but the latter was not found until the arrival of the firefighters. It is not clear how long the girl would have remained in the hole.
Unfortunately, she was already no longer breathing by the time the emergency services finally managed to extricate her from the ground, after using shovels and support boards to try to reach her body without the hole collapsing further on her. .
During the journey to the hospital, the rescuers did everything to try to resuscitate the little girl, in vain. His death was confirmed at the hospital, according to Sandra King.
For his part, her brother was rushed to a hospital by agents of the Broward Sheriff’s Office and was in stable condition, she added to the Miami Herald, while the police confirmed that An investigation was underway.
This tragic death is added to an already well-stocked list of preventable accidental tragedies that occurred on a beach after digging a hole.
Just in May 2023, a 17-year-old boy was reported to have died in similar circumstances after the hole he was digging closed on him at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, the New York Post reported.
In May 2022, an 18-year-old young man and his 17-year-old sister also found themselves stuck in the ground of a Jersey Shore beach after digging a large hole, costing the young adult his life.
The “New England Journal of Medicine” also reported 52 accidents involving holes dug in the sand, which caused the death of 31 people aged between 3 and 21, between 1997 and 2007 alone, according to the American media.
