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, the Associated Press, NBC affiliate WCSH and Fox affiliate WFXT reported.
After she found herself in waist-deep sand, she recalled shouting to her husband, “I can’t get out,” per the AP.
“I just dropped like a rock,” Acord told 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 wasn’t scary, it was kind of surreal,” Acord added.
Jim Britt, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, told the AP that the real-life scenario Accord experienced isn’t something out of a Hollywood movie.
“The reality with this supersaturated sand is you’re not going to go under,” Britt said.
He went on to say that climate 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 scenario” 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.
