A frightening experience involving a 2-year-old along the Jersey Shore has led to a town banning the digging of large holes at the beach.
The town of Sea Girt instituted the new rule Thursday and it will be in place for the summer. According to the new ordinance, holes cannot be deeper than 12 inches, cannot be left unattended and must be filled before leaving the area.
Sea Girt is not the first Jersey Shore town to implement such a rule. Seaside Heights and Belmar also have rules regulating hole size.
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It comes after a 2-year-old boy gave his parents the scare of their lives in February when sand collapsed and buried him alive as he played at Neptune Place Beach in the town. Police responded to a call of a missing child just before 11:30 a.m. on Feb. 10.
The boy's father apparently had been able to extricate the child from the sand pit within two or three minutes of him being swallowed up, officials said, as the dad dug frantically. The child survived, remaining conscious and alert throughout the ordeal; he was taken to a hospital as a precaution.
Police said the child and his father had not been digging a hole, and the ground simply collapsed under the child.
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Chopper 4 showed aerial footage from the scene two days later, with the gaping hole cordoned off, preventing anyone else from walking on the area officials feared could be unstable at the time.
Sea Girt has added close to 600,000 tons of sand to its beaches since the start of 2024. The beaches in town had just reopened a week before the incident.
In 2022, an 18-year-old died after the hole he was digging in the sand in Toms River collapsed and suffocated him.
