Page 7 - IAV Digital Magazine #596

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Woman Swallowed by Quicksand While Enjoying Walk OnTheBeachwithHusband: 'DroppedLikeaRock'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkr-RW2Xdpg
By David Chiu, People
What started as a normal day at the beach turned into into a startling ordeal for a woman who suddenly found herself caught in quicksand.
Jamie Acord said that the incident happened to her while she and her husband were walking along Popham Beach State Park in Phippsburg, Maine.
"Literally it was kind of like I just dropped into a man-
hole cover," she tells PEO- PLE. "We're walking along, just talking, and all of a sudden I went into the sand."
After she found herself in waist-deep sand, she recalled telling her hus- band, "I can't get out," per the Associated Press.
"I just dropped like a rock," Acord told NBC
affiliate WCSH. "I was there and then the next minute I wasn't."
Fortunately, her husband pulled her out, and she was left only with a few scrapes from the sand.
"It was kind of one of those moments where I didn't know what to do. This is a new thing that's never hap- pened before," she tells PEOPLE. "And I go to that beach all the time."
"And as soon as he pulled me out, we turned around to look to see what had occurred because we just assumed I'd fallen in an actual hole and there was nothing there," she adds. "It looked just like the beach. It had filled itself right back in."
Later, after she had already changed out of her clothes, which were covered in "wet-cement-like sand," she decided to post about the experience on social media to warn others, especially those who go to the beach alone at off- hours.
"If the beach is clearing out, there's only one or two people on the beach and you fall in something like that and you don't know what to do or you can't get out, you're kind of stuck," she says.
Jim Britt, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry,
told the AP that the real-life scenario Acord experi- enced isn’t something out of a Hollywood movie.
“The reality with this super- saturated sand is you’re not going to go under,” Britt said.
He went on to say that cli- mate change was a factor in what happened, as a number of winter storms redirected river water to a sand area where visitors are most likely to walk
on. "The sand is saturated with water," Britt said, per WCSH. “It’s even more unstable and very easy to find yourself sinking into it."
Still, Britt said it is a “100 percent survivable sce- nario” if someone find themselves trapped in supersaturated sand.
“The rule is stay calm,” he told WCSH. “Lean back. Find your way back.”
Sean Vaillancourt, who manages Popham Beach for Maine’s Bureau of Parks and Land, also encouraged people to remain calm. “Just take your time and crawl out if you have to,” he
told WFXT. “You can also lean forward or back in a floating position. The more you can disperse your weight over that, the more you can move freely."
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine