Supersaturated Sand Trap: Quicksand Pulls Woman Down on Maine Beach
If you like to take long walks along the beach, make sure you bring a tow truck.
By Katie Compa · June 13, 2024
On a Maine beach this week, an unsuspecting woman, Jamie Acord, took a walk along Popham Beach State Park, picking up trash. One moment, this good Samaritan was cleaning up the picturesque shoreline—the next, she found herself hip-deep in a pool of quicksand.
If you’re an extremely cool Boomer, a member of GenX, or blessed to be an elder millennial, you’re not even a little bit surprised—you already knew the dangers of quicksand very well from its appearances in movies and television, from The Neverending Story to The Princess Bride to Blazing Saddles.
And those were the latecomers! In the 1960s, three percent (this is a lot relative to the actual chances of encountering quicksand) of all TV and films made used quicksand in a scene—with zany results.
Quicksand was a hot commodity among plot devices for decades—it even made an appearance on the famously realistic Baywatch in 1998 (though regular readers of this site will note he did this to himself).
“Crypto’s List” (which tells you how old it is—there was just the one guy who went by Crypto) compiled all of the TV and films featuring quicksand scenes, of which there are hundreds.
Not so these days. We made it through six seasons of Lost—on a deserted island!—twelve seasons of The Big Bang Theory (whom you’d think would have taken the opportunity to nerdsplain viscosity and non-Newtonian fluids), fifteen seasons of Supernatural—even the final season of Game of Thrones managed not to turn to liquefied soil to move the story forward, although honestly, perhaps they should have considered it.
We always learned that the most important tip if you find yourself sinking in the supersaturated stuff: Don’t panic! Struggling only makes you go down faster and get more stuck. This is actually true—pulling your foot out of quicksand once you’ve started sinking requires the same amount of pressure as to lift a car. Science!
But it turns out that drowning in quicksand is a myth—because of its density, it’s actually impossible to sink far enough and you can actually float on it. (In Maine, Jamie Acord simply had her husband, Patrick, pull her out.) Please, someone, inform the screenwriters and excuse us while we call our therapists to reckon with being lied to our entire childhoods.
Obviously, the culprit—as for many (most) things these days—is climate change. Some storms over the winter changed the course of a nearby river that empties into the ocean at Popham Beach, saturating the sand beyond its capacity.
So if you’re vacationing (or doing beach cleanup!) in Maine this summer, be sure to exercise vigilance lest you… well, lest you have absolutely nothing happen aside from a mild inconvenience, ideally. Just try not to fall face first.