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Topics: US News, News, Social Media
Jess Hardiman
A woman has issued a warning to others after experiencing a freak accident that many people might assume only happens in cartoons.
Jamie Acord was walking along Popham Beach State Park in Phippsburg, Maine, last weekend when she suddenly found herself waist-deep in sand.
While it might sound like an amusing scene of out a Vicar of Dibley episode, it’s fair to say things have gone horribly wrong as Acord soon realised she was ‘stuck’.
She’d also been collecting rubbish at the time, so she had no free hands to help wrestle her body free.
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"Literally it was kind of like I just dropped into a manhole cover," Acord told People.
"We're walking along, just talking, and all of a sudden I went into the sand."
Thankfully, at the time, she was with her husband Patrick, who gallantly sprung into action to pull her out as she screamed: “I can’t get out!”
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While she managed to get out with just a few scrapes from the sand, it’s fair to say that it left the couple pretty baffled.
Acord continued: "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.
"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.
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"It looked just like the beach. It had filled itself right back in."
After getting freed from the cement-like sand, Acord took to social media to share her story, and is now speaking out to warn others.
According to ABC News, a series of winter storms were to blame after re-routing a river that flows into the ocean, in turn softening the sand along parts of the beach where people regularly walk.
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This led to Acord’s surprising patch of quicksand, which is also known as supersaturated sand.
Jim Britt, spokesperson for the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, told WCSH: "The sand is saturated with water.
“It’s even more unstable and very easy to find yourself sinking into it."
As for the trick for the ‘100 percent survivable scenario’? Britt added: “The rule is stay calm. Lean back. Find your way back.”