COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Feeling lucky? Maybe so. But I will tell you straight up -- you are nowhere near as lucky as Dylan Scott, a 13-year-old young man from Riverside. Not by a long shot.

Last Sunday, Dylan and his younger brother were enjoying a day at the beach on Balboa Peninsula under the watchful eye of their mom, Wendy Scott.

Is there anything more fun than the beach on a Sunday afternoon? There is not.

Wendy was keeping an eye on Dylan’s brother who was in the water, because that’s what moms do ? with good reason. You got your surf, your riptides, your jellyfish, your big kids, your flying boogie boards and your occasional shark. She wasn’t overly worried about Dylan, who was nearby digging a hole in the sand.

Is there anything more nostalgic than digging a hole in the sand at the beach on a summer afternoon? There is not.

We’ve all done it since we could barely walk. You take your little pail and your little shovel and you dig and dig then dig some more.

The problem is, Dylan Scott doesn’t dig like most kids dig. When Dylan digs, he digs big.

“He’s a digger,” Wendy Scott told a Pilot reporter. “He always wants to dig caves in our backyard.”

Apparently, Dylan had been working on his latest excavation last Sunday for over an hour ? and in an hour, Dylan Scott can move more sand than a Euclid truck with a hungry Teamster at the wheel at 11:55 a.m.

While Wendy Scott kept watch over her younger son in the surf, Dylan dug a hole some 5-feet deep and was still going strong. But when Wendy turned back, Dylan was gone.

That’s gone as in disappeared ? vanished, poof, nowhere to be seen, like he’d never been there.

Wendy had just discovered something that few people have ever heard of but that happens more often than you think ? sand hole collapses. According to a 2002 study by a father-son medical team, Dr. Barry J. Maron and Dr. Bradley Maron, four people died in the United States in sand hole accidents between 1997 and 2000. That’s a small number when you consider that about 5,000 people in the U.S. die each year in drowning accidents. But the fact that such an innocent activity can be deadly at all is what is so surprising.

The physics of it aren’t complicated, even for me. Dry sand is heavy, unstable and almost as fluid as water. According to safety experts, a sand hole any deeper than your knees can turn dangerous, fast. A large hole can swallow up a person in the blink of an eye and without a trace, which is a big part of the problem. Unlike a hole in dirt, when a sand hole collapses, it fills up seamlessly. If a person is buried completely, you could be standing on top of them and not know it.

In each case in the Marons’ study, the victim had vanished in seconds, leaving behind virtually no trace in the seemingly undisturbed sand. In some cases, people nearby saw or realized what happened. In others, the victims weren’t found for hours. Luckily for Wendy Scott, she knew what had happened to her son instantly and started shouting for people nearby to call 911 and help her dig. Wendy dug with her hands like her life depended on it, which her son’s did.

That’s problem No. 2 with sand accidents. Even if someone shows up with a shovel, you can’t start jamming it into the sand when you have no idea exactly where the victim is. You have a few minutes at best to dig someone out. Fortunately for Dylan Scott, it took his mom less than that to find a handful of his hair and give it a mighty pull.

“She just jams her hand in the sand and gets his hair,” Newport Beach Battalion Chief Paul Matheis told the Pilot.

By that time, lifeguards and firefighters were on the scene, but it took a few tries to free Dylan from his sandy predicament because the space around him kept collapsing.

They were finally able to pull Dylan free, and he was rushed to Hoag Hospital, unconscious and a distinct shade of blue. Firefighters estimated that Dylan had been buried for two to three minutes. After a few hours of examining, testing and sand removal, Dylan was pronounced good to go, although probably not to the beach for a while. Wendy Scott said her son has given up on excavating until further notice, but I suspect he’ll be back in business before long.

Dylan’s sub-coastal adventure took a sharp turn to the right on Wednesday, when the Scott family and Mike Nichols ? a lifeguard who helped rescue Dylan, not the director ? were flown to New York to be interviewed on Thursday morning’s “Today” show. I guess it is a story you don’t hear every day: Boy goes to beach, beach swallows boy, mom makes beach cough up boy.

I hope the Scotts and Mike Nichols like it hot. New York is in the grip of a heat wave, a recently arrived gift from the West Coast, with temperatures near 100, humidity just below 90 and a heat index hovering at 111 degrees. Sound familiar?

And there you have it, the saga of Dylan Scott. Two big thumbs up to Wendy Scott for keeping her head in a nightmare scenario come to life, and to the emergency workers and bystanders who made sure Dylan would go on to dig another day.

If this kid doesn’t become an engineer or a construction supervisor, I’ll eat my hat. Wait, a miner maybe. If there’s anything down there, Dylan’ll find it.

I gotta go.