A 20-year-old Korean college student was pronounced dead at Ventura County Medical Center on Wednesday after the sides of a deep hole in the sand collapsed on him at Oxnard Beach Park.
The student at Santa Clarita-based Master's College died after spending the day at the beach with a group of other students, said Darwin Base, a battalion chief with the Oxnard Fire Department. Base said the students had dug a large pit in the sand that was reportedly 6 to 8 feet deep. Witnesses told firefighters the 20-year-old lay down in the bottom of the pit and it collapsed.
He apparently was trying to photograph the hole from inside, Base said, when the sand collapsed.
The Oxnard Fire Department was notified of the incident at 4:50 p.m., and firefighters arrived minutes later at the scene in the 1600 block of South Harbor Boulevard.
Rescuers used hand tools, including 5-gallon buckets and shovels, to locate the man. It took about 15 minutes to extricate him. CPR was started immediately, Base said.
Oxnard police said the area was considered an accident site and not a crime scene, but that they helped with crowd control after the incident.
The scene was far different hours later, with the beach nearly deserted as local resident Charles Swiley walked his dog late Wednesday near the Embassy Suites Mandalay Beach Resort.
The retiree who lives nearby saw the aftermath of the accident.
He said he heard sirens as he was coming home from the market late Wednesday afternoon and went to the beach to see what was going on.
Once there, he saw emergency workers pulling the young man out of the sand with ropes.
"What happened was just tragic," Swiley said.
After the student was pulled from the hole, he was taken to the hospital in Ventura with CPR in progress, but the efforts failed to revive him, authorities said.
Authorities did not release his name pending notification of next of kin.
Digging such holes can be extremely dangerous, Base said, as the sand and surrounding soil tend to be very unstable.
Base said when he's seen people on the beach digging a large hole, he's warned them of the danger.
"It's really something people need to know about," he said.
Base said lifeguards often will warn people who dig holes, as well. But the stretch of beach where the student was buried did not have a lifeguard nearby, Base said.
Statistics on the prevalence of such accidents were unavailable late Wednesday, but figures cited in the New England Journal of Medicine may shed some light on the problem. Warning of such incidents, Drs. Bradley A. Maron and Barry J. Maron and registered nurse Tammy S. Haas wrote a letter to the editor on the problem that was published in June 2007. In the letter, they cited statistics they and others had collected on the dangers of sand hole collapses.
They said the group had assembled 52 documented cases of fatal and nonfatal incidents involving a person being buried when a sand hole collapsed. They said victims ranged from 3 to 21 years old and that 87 percent were males.
In 60 percent of the cases they studied, the collapse resulted in death. The authors credited quick rescue as a reason for the survival of the other 40 percent. They said many of the survivors needed cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
The incidents most often occurred on public beaches and holes usually were 2 to 15 feet wide and 2 to 12 feet deep.
Swiley said Wednesday's death wasn't the first at the beach in the 12 or so years he's lived nearby.
Cindy Conolly, of Sioux City, Iowa, was killed in 2006 after a sport utility vehicle accidentally ran over her while she sunbathed there. The vehicle was part of a beach patrol by the Oxnard Police Department.
Nor was Wednesday's death the first in the county due to an excavation collapse. In March 2007, a 32-year-old construction worker was killed after a trench he was digging collapsed on him in Thousand Oaks. Daniel Contreras was no longer breathing by the time rescuers pulled him out. Rescuers performed CPR, to no avail.
Copyright 2012 - Ventura County Star, Calif.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
