“It was like the bottom fell out, I just sunk into the ground,” Jaime Acord tells Inside Edition.
A Maine woman who became stuck in quicksand while walking along a beach says the ordeal happened so quickly, there was little time to react.
“It was like the bottom fell out, I just sunk into the ground,” Jaime Acord tells Inside Edition.
Acord was walking on the beach with her husband in Phippsburg.
“It was just like walking on hard-packed sand on the beach, and up until that point, everything was hard-packed sand,” Acord says.
Acord says the sand was up to her waist
“I couldn’t get myself out so I just looked at my husband and said, ‘I can't get out, can you pull me out.’ And he had looked at me and he was like, ‘Where are your legs?’ And I was like, 'I can still feel them, but I don't know where they are,’" she says.
Acord’s husband was able to pull her out.
Quicksand is commonly found along shorelines, especially during low tide.
Quicksand is often difficult to identify but if water is a few feet away and you see a pocket of saturated sand with water sitting on top of it, is important to be cautious because it may be quicksand.
Survival consultant Shane Hobel shared tips with Inside Edition on how to get out of sinking sand.
“One, we're not going to wiggle. That just makes us go deeper. So we're going to slow down. We're going to stop. If we don't have any sticks or anything to work with, we have to use ourselves,” Hobel says. “One of the things we can do is get on the hands and knees and we can then start to crawl out.”
Hobel says the best way to get out of quicksand if you are stuck is to use a stick and find firm ground around you. “You can then use that as your support and start to work slowly, sort of in slow wiggle and keep pulling up.”
“Start driving up and get your foot to firm ground and then you can start working the other leg,” Hobel says.
