Jamie Acord was walking on a Maine beach with her husband this past weekend, when she suddenly sunk hip deep into real-life quicksand. Stunned, Acord says she could neither feel the bottom nor gain footing to push herself out. Luckily, her husband was there to pull her to safety.
According to AP News, the couple was walking by the water at Popham Beach State Park when Acord sank into the quicksand pit in the blink of an eye. Acord then let out a scream and said, “I can’t get out!”
Britannica defines quicksand as “sand that behaves as a liquid because it is saturated with water.” The encyclopedia site calls quicksand “a mucky nuisance” but also says it’s very unlikely to kill a person. Because quicksand is denser than the human body, Britannica says quicksand won’t suck humans to the bottom. Rather, the human will float.
“Our legs are pretty dense, so [humans] may sink, but the torso contains the lungs, and thus is buoyant enough to stay out of trouble,” says Britannica on its website.
In an interview with local news, a representative of the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry suggested Acord stepped on a pocket of supersaturated sand “caused by the changing direction of the nearby Morse River.”
Department communications director Jim Britt said: “The sand is saturated with water. It’s [. . .] very easy to find yourself sinking into it.”
Have you heard of real-life quicksand?