Beach Disaster: Quicksand Swallows Woman as She Screams for Husband to Rescue Her - 'I Can't Get Out!'
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
An idyllic walk on a Maine beach turned into a nightmare for a woman who walked into quicksand.
Jamie Acord said she and her husband were walking along Popham Beach when the ground gave way, according to WCSH.
“I just dropped like a rock. [My husband] said I was there, and then the next minute I wasn’t,” she said. The U.K.’s Daily Mail noted that she called out, “I can’t get out!”
“I couldn’t feel the ground with my feet,” she said. “I couldn’t push myself out.”
“Literally it was kind of like I just dropped into a manhole cover,” she said, according to People. “We’re walking along, just talking, and all of a sudden, I went into 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 happened before. And I go to that beach all the time,” she said.
Quicksand doesn’t just happen in Hollywood. It happened on a Maine beach https://t.co/4QtyCIwYRo pic.twitter.com/7U5rhUlu8p
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) June 11, 2024
Falling in was bad enough, then came the weird part.
“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. It looked just like the beach. It had filled itself right back in,” she said.
She said afterward that her clothes were covered in “wet, cement-like sand.”
The Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry said Acord stepped into some supersaturated sand, WCSH reported.
“The sand is saturated with water,” department communications director Jim Britt said. “It’s even more unstable and very easy to find yourself sinking into it.”
Britt said no one will be swallowed whole, adding, “What is occurring is a 100-percent survivable scenario.”
Warning signs are going up, Sean Vaillancourt, who manages the beach for the state Bureau of Parks and Land, said, according to WFXV.
Vaillancourt said keeping calm helps if one falls into the sand.
“Just take your time and crawl out if you have to,” Vaillancourt said. “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.”
He said the quicksand is usually no more than waist deep.
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