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A young girl died when a hole she was digging collapsed and buried both her and a little boy on a beach.
The pair had been digging hole five or six feet deep on a south Florida beach on Tuesday, February 20, when the sand gave way and covered them both.
Emergency responders found the boy, eight, buried up to his chest in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea around 3pm, according to Sandra King, spokesperson for Pompano Beach Fire Rescue.
The seven-year-old girl was trapped beneath him. It is not known how long they had been buried, according to Ms King.
TV news footage tape, cones and buggies around the collapsed hole where a girl died and boy was buried on a beach at Lauderdale-by-the-sea in south Florida (Picture: WPLG Local 10)
A red bucket rests next to caution tape around the hole where a girl, seven, died when the sand collapsed on a beach in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida (Picture: Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
Rescue desperately dug the children out with shovels, using support boards to stop more sand from falling in.
A witness told Local 10 News: ‘You saw grown men digging with shovels and buckets and nobody could find her.
‘I guess when the wall caved in she may have been laying flat and so maybe it just kind of pancaked her.’
Video footage shows one of the children being rushed away by first responders after being pulled out.
Once freed, the girl was taken to Broward Health Medical Centre in Fort Lauderdale but was declared dead.
The boy is in a stable condition in hospital.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether an adult was helping the children dig the hole.
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Digging holes is a common pastime for beach-goers, with videos of men flocking to help construct sand holes becoming a common theme on TikTok.
But the excavations can be deadly.
Last December, an Australian man, 25-year-old Josh Taylor, died after being buried alive in a 1.5m pit where he and his friends had been roasting a pig on the picturesque Bribie Island off the coast of Queensland.
He was given CPR at the scene before being flown to a Brisbane hospital, but his life support was later switched off with his family by his side.
A 17-year-old boy died when he became trapped in several feet of sand in a hole he dug in the dunes of a North Carolina beach in May 2023.
Family members and National Park rangers performed CPR on him, but he did not survive.
A boy, 13, narrowly avoided being buried alive on a Wales beach when witnesses heard his screams for help in June 2022.
Lifeguards and members of the public used children’s spades to free him from the sand when a huge hole he was digging at Dolwen Beach, in Aberport, caved in.
One onlooker said: ‘The boy was very lucky the incident didn’t happen in the evening when the beach would have been deserted.’
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