A woman and her dog had a frightening encounter with quicksand on Glenelg North beach in South Australia. Sarah Darbyshire was videoing her walk with her maltese dog, Mr Bean, when she stepped into a patch of liquefied sand. Initially amused, she quickly realised the danger as she began to sink rapidly.
“I couldn’t believe how quick I went down. Pulling one leg out, you just went in deeper,” Darbyshire said. She managed to free herself without assistance, but another woman, Madz June, required four police officers and five firefighters to rescue her from the same spot. June described feeling as though her legs were “vacuum sealed into a bag.”
Holdfast Bay council has since erected warning signs at the beach. Quicksand, a mixture of sand, water and clay, traps legs by compacting around them. Dr Benjy Marks, a civil engineering lecturer at the University of Sydney, explained that while quicksand is rare outside of earthquakes, it can occur when water wells up through sand, destabilising it.
Contrary to movie depictions, people cannot be sucked entirely under because sand is denser than the human body; sinking typically stops at waist depth. The real danger lies in getting stuck as the tide comes in, which nearly happened to June. Experts advise staying calm and either lying on one’s back to “swim” out or rotating legs slowly to reintroduce water and loosen the sand.
