Thursday, 4:30 PM
Physician cautions beachgoers: sand holes can kill
By Felicia Mello, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
A Harvard medical resident wants sunbathers to pay attention to yet another threat: collapsing sand holes that he says have killed dozens of young people in the past two decades.
Dr. Bradley Maron has spent years studying the phenomena, after twice seeing children almost suffocate to death on a Martha’s Vineyard beach. In a letter in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, he warns that a pastime as innocent as building a sandcastle could lead to a family tragedy.
Maron was a 23-year-old lab technician with dreams of a medical career when he came across a scene of "total chaos" during an afternoon walk on Edgartown’s South Beach in 1998, he said in an interview. Kids at a birthday party had dug a seven-foot-deep cavity in the sand and were trying to jump over it when one fell in. The walls of the hole caved, obliterating any sign of the 8-year-old girl.
She survived, but the accident made an impression on Maron, who had witnessed a similar incident as a student lifeguard three years earlier.
As Maron began to investigate, he quickly uncovered similar sand cave-ins around the country. The rare accidents fit a tragic pattern, according to Maron’s research: A buildup of pressure causes the sides of a hole to crumble suddenly, burying alive a child or teenager playing inside. The victim, usually a boy, remains submerged for several minutes as bystanders panic and rescuers, afraid to use a shovel because they might hit the person, struggle to reach them by hand.
