Sand Collapse 2

[TigerGuy]

https://www.theblaze.com/news/teen-dies-sand-collapse

In the past week, two young people lost their lives while playing in sand. These tragedies could have been avoided. Was this an engineering failure?

As the engineering community, do we have a moral obligation to do better to educate the general public about hazards around them? How would we go about helping people help themselves stay safe?

 

[Compositepro]

And a significant number of those on beach do not even know how to swim.

 

[LittleInch]

If you look at some photos / news footage, the water is right at the edge of the hole, though maybe when they started it was low tide.

A lot of beaches you will get pretty dense firm sand right until you hit the water table when it turn to dirty water and can undermine any hole you've just dug. The 10 foot comes from the person ringing 911, so may only have been 4 to 6 feet, but deep enough that the boy who perished was completely buried by all accounts.

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[1503-44]

To be fair, sometimes unstable conditions might not be so apparent when beginning a dig in tide prone beaches. Where tide ranges are high, you can dig a hole in firm sand at low tide then the sand becomes unstable as a rising tide increases water pore pressure in the void space, eventually boiling the bottom and collapsing the sides.

A black swan to a turkey is a white swan to the butcher ... and to Boeing.

 

[kjoiner]

J Stephen "I was reading here a while back about people using high-voltage transformers from microwaves to do wood-burning patterns."

I've seen that too. It's called fractal burning and is really dangerous - lethal dangerous. Most woodworking forums have banned the discussion of it and any posts. I'm on a couple of guitar forums and have seen some members doing it as well to guitar bodies accompanied with justified warnings from other members.


Regarding digging holes in the sand, Colin Furze, the guy who made pulse jet engines for bikes and mostly a lot of other cool stuff, did a video where he dug a deep hole in the sand and actually built an undergorund (undersand) room at the beach. He used plywood and other forms to "reinforce" the sand but I cringed watching him do it. Very bad idea.


Kyle