Not a Shore Thing: No More Digging on our Beach, Says Local Town
A New Jersey shore town will prohibit visitors from digging holes on its beachfront. Where, we ask, is Gollum supposed to seabathe this summer?
By Katie Compa · May 11, 2024
From Springsteen to Snooki, the Jersey Shore has a colorful reputation up and down the East Coast and beyond (hordes of Quebecois Canadians who love the shore)—all kinds of people go to visit. Each summer, hundreds of thousands of visitors descend on its sandy seafront, be they families with young children, elderly year-round residents, or drunken young people renting a summer house.
Regardless of their demographics, many Shore-ophiles engage in the same time-honored summertime ritual: Digging a big hole in the sand. If you’ve never seen a dadbod and a shovel communing at the edge of the ocean, you’ve simply never been to a mid-Atlantic beach.
Most beach visitors are relatively vigilant about the most widely known threat—shark attacks. But data about sand-hole accidents reveal that it’s almost as dangerous out of the water as in. Though sand-hole disasters are slightly rarer than shark attacks, over half of the time, they’re also fatal—sand-holes have weak walls, and they can collapse. Even someone passing by might trigger a sand-valanche back into the pit someone has spent hours digging, maybe even suffocating them.
This spring, the community of Sea Girt, NJ passed a local ordinance to create stricter rules around digging sand holes on their stretch of the beach: No more burying people “below grade or in standing position,” and no holes deeper than 12″ (or, if shorter, the knees of the shortest participant). Even the legal holes may not be left unattended, and must be filled before leaving the area.
(Parenthetically, aside from the legitimate safety concerns about unsupervised amateurs digging giant sarlaccs at the beach, we’re sure the new policy has absolutely nothing to do with rich people buying up local real estate after damage from Hurricane Sandy forced many Shore residents to leave, giving up their properties to house-flippers and speculators and sending property values skyrocketing. Anyway, as everyone knows, rich people are very laid-back about mixing with hoi polloi—that’s Latin for “poors”—and love to let them use their things and properties at no charge.)
With all that said, we at the Odd News Show want all of our readers everywhere to enjoy a safe, oxygenated, suffocation-free summer, so even if you find yourself on a beach that doesn’t prohibit digging holes, we urge you to Sand Responsibly. Stay alert, and make sure you don’t cause or bear witness to the inevitable establishment of a La Brea Sand Pit tourist attraction.