A 7-year-old girl died on Tuesday after the hole she was digging with her brother at a Florida beach collapsed, burying the pair in sand, the authorities said — one of a few instances in which such an episode turns deadly each year in the United States.
The girl, Sloan Mattingly, was on vacation with her family from Indiana in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, a coastal town about 30 miles north of Miami, and was playing in the sand with her 9-year-old brother, Maddox, when they became stuck on Tuesday afternoon, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
In a 911 call released by the Sheriff’s Office, beachgoers can be heard screaming as a breathless woman, who describes herself as a registered nurse, tells the operator that “there’s a little girl buried in the sand.” The girl’s father had yelled for help, and people were trying to dig her out, the woman says. She says she could not see any part of the girl’s body. “Mom’s yelling, ‘My daughter’s in there,’” she says.
Footage appeared to show other beachgoers crowded around the sand hole, trying to dig out the girl before rescuers arrived. Other 911 callers sounded distressed as they described the frantic scene.
Sandra King, a spokeswoman for Pompano Beach Fire Rescue, said that rescuers had been called to the beach at around 3:15 p.m. and had found several adults frantically trying to dig the two children from the hole, which was about four to five feet deep by four to five feet wide. The boy was buried up to his chest, and the girl was underneath the sand completely, she said. Rescuers secured the edges of the hole to prevent it from collapsing further and managed to extract them both.
Rescuers tried to resuscitate the girl, who had no pulse, as they took her to a hospital, where, the sheriff’s office said, she was later pronounced dead. The boy was uninjured, Ms. King said. “The scene was very, very traumatic, and the parents were absolutely hysterical, understandably,” she said. “They’re there to enjoy a day at the beach and this horrible tragedy occurs.”
The sheriff’s office is investigating the girl’s death. Ms. King said that would include looking into how the hole came to be so large.
Up to three people in the country are killed each year by collapsing sand at beaches, said Tom Gill, the vice president of the United States Lifesaving Association. “The ocean, we’ve always known, is an incredibly dynamic environment,” he said by phone on Wednesday. “But the sand is fairly similar.”
Earlier this month, a 2-year-old boy was rescued from a collapsed sand pit on a Jersey Shore beach, and in May, a teenager died after he was buried in several feet of sand inside a hole that had been dug in a back-dune area at a national park in North Carolina. A 2007 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine cited 52 fatal and nonfatal cases across the country in the preceding decade.
Mr. Gill, from the Lifesaving Association, said that a good rule of thumb is to never dig a hole more than knee deep of the smallest person who will get into it. Lifeguards are on alert for holes that look too big, or need to be filled in, he added, and play a crucial role in preventing such accidents, and rescuing people who become trapped.
Officials with Lauderdale-by-the-Sea did not immediately respond on Wednesday to a request for information about whether or not its beaches have lifeguards. They directed further questions to the sheriff’s office.
The girl’s family also could not be immediately reached on Wednesday.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
