A headline earlier this year caused my Gen X brain to recoil and wonder, “How has it come to this?”
The Del Mar City Council had just voted to ban digging holes and burying people in the sand at its 2.2 miles of beaches. Violators could face fines.
I closed my eyes and hoped for a Hot Tub Time Machine to take me away, back even just a few decades, to a time when fewer restrictions were placed on kids’ playtimes and a family day at the beach wasn’t fettered by legislation.
“Staff and concerned members of the community have observed an increase in the digging of hazardous holes and the burying of individuals,” the city of Del Mar wrote: “This has resulted in safety concerns including collapse hazards, trip-and-fall risks, impediments to emergency vehicles and equipment, and potential injury or suffocation.”
None of those major concerns have actually occurred at Del Mar beaches, confirmed Maggie Jones, a management analyst for the City of Del Mar’s Community Services Department, who spearheaded the ordinance.
I went up to visit the Del Mar City Beach below Seagrove Park in mid-May, a few weeks before Memorial Day, the holiday that serves as a national summons to go to the beach.
On a clear Saturday afternoon, the shoreline was in moderate use. I didn’t see a single sand hole being excavated or left unused. A pair of city staffers were overseeing safety on the beach.
The Del Mar ordinance states that a hole in the sand cannot be dug deeper than two feet and people may not be covered by sand. All holes must be refilled. Parents may be held responsible for deep holes dug by their children.
Poway’s Lindsey King was on the Del Mar beach with her two children. This was her first time here. She said her family likes to go crab-digging on the sand at Fletcher Cove.
She was unaware of the no-hole-digging rule.
“I remember when I was a kid and how fun it was to dig a really big hole,” King said. “And yes, we all sound like we’re 100 years old when we say ‘Back in my day, when I used to dig holes,’ but this feels like one of those things where everything is changing.”
She was torn by the new ordinance.
“I can see both sides,” King said. “I think I’d be really frustrated and upset if I was digging some cute, small little hole and I got a stern talking to about it. But…I can see young kids getting stuck and being scared, parents not knowing where to find them. And I can see a lifeguard slipping and twisting his ankle.”
King asked her kids their opinions. Hendricks, 6, loves to dig for crabs in the sand but he acknowledged you could get stuck. Nola, 8, is not one for digging holes. “But other people might like to dig holes, so they should change the rule,” she said.
Del Mar is not alone in barring sand hole digging. Similar policies exist in Imperial Beach, and north of us in Newport, Laguna and Huntington beaches.
It’s fine to be proactive — we don’t need to wait for a problem to fix it. But safety measures ought to be proportionate to threat level.
So what is the threat level? Well, The Center for Conservation and Biology in 2017 reported that each year, 180 million Americans make 2 billion beach visits.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine ten years earlier showed that over a 10-year period, from 1997 to 2007, 31 people died and another 21 were injured in the United States due to dry sand hole collapses.
That averages to three deaths and two injuries annually in the U.S., across 2 billion annual beach trips.
There has never been a sand-hole fatality in San Diego. In 2024, a 16-year-old girl was trapped in a Mission Beach hole that collapsed. She was rescued without injury.
Stephen Leatherman, widely renowned as “Dr. Beach,” wrote in an email to Times of San Diego that more people die each year in the U.S. from sand hole collapses than shark attacks (one in 2025). There were also 25 nonfatal shark bite incidents last year, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.
We’ve learned to fear for our lives from sharks. Yet, no ordinance currently exists to discourage swimmers from interacting with sharks. (Yes, there are temporary beach closures after shark sightings.)
We could look at all beach or ocean-related deaths. The Centers for Disease Control found that 4,500 people drowned unintentionally in the United States in 2022. Annually, an estimated 100 people drown from rip currents along U.S. beaches.
Using Del Mar ordinance logic, should we: Ban people from swimming in the ocean? Only allow them to step two feet deep into the surf? Should we fine people who swim into a rip current?
Of course not. Common sense is called for, not legislation.
No one should ignore the possible danger of letting a young child play on the beach in a hole that’s taller than they are. In unstable sand, a cave-in can happen without warning. Parents ought to always have at least one eye on children playing at the beach, in and out of the water.
Del Mar’s hole-digging ordinance is excessive. An ounce of prevention can be worth a pound of cure but this law seems like a ton of prevention aimed at an ounce of danger.
Ron Donoho is the founder of the San Diego Sun and the author of Times of San Diego’s weekly dowtown-focused newsletter.
“Just think about it” is his monthly column.
