A young girl has died after a day of fun at a beach in South Florida turned into tragedy.
The seven-year-old girl was digging a hole at the beach with her brother when the hole suddenly collapsed and pulled them underneath the sand.
The girl was completely buried in the sand underneath her older brother, 8, who was buried up to his chest. The hole was about 1.8 metres (about six feet) deep when it collapsed.
Emergency workers were called and responded to the beach area outside the High Noon Resort Hotel in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea around 3 p.m. on Tuesday. In the meantime, a group of about 20 Good Samaritans frantically tried to dig the kids out.
Pompano Beach Fire Rescue used support boards to keep more sand from collapsing in as they used shovels to dig the children out, spokesperson Sandra King said. It wasn’t immediately clear how long the two were buried.
When firefighters reached the girl, they found she had no pulse. She was rushed to Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, where she was pronounced dead.
“We were conducting life-saving techniques to try to bring her pulse back, and it never did recover,” King told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The eight-year-old boy was also rushed to the hospital. He is in stable condition.
Images taken from news helicopters showed the area around the sand hole cordoned off with cones and yellow police tape.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the circumstances that led to the tragedy.
This isn’t the first time collapsing sand has claimed lives.
In May 2022, an 18-year-old died and his 17-year-old sister was injured after the hole the pair were digging at a New Jersey beach collapsed in on them.
Three months later, a 35-year-old man from Florida died when a sand dune collapsed on him while he was recording a video of the sunrise.