Rescue personnel at Solfatara near Naples, where three members of the same family died. Credit: EPA
Posted on 09/12/2017 9:20:16 AM PDT by BenLurkin
An Italian couple and their 11-year-old son died in a freak accident on Tuesday when they fell into a 10ft-deep hole that suddenly opened up in a highly active volcanic area near Naples.
Police said the child strayed beyond safety barriers and was swallowed up by the pit, plunging into boiling hot mud at the Solfatara Crater in Pozzuoli, part of a huge volcanic area known as the Campi Flegrei or Phlegrean Fields.
His father, 45, reportedly rushed to his rescue but also fell into the sink-hole. The boy’s mother, 42, then went to their aid, but she too was swallowed by the pit. All three died, overcome by the mud and sulphurous gases.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
“Police said the child strayed beyond safety barriers...”
Maybe the safety barriers are there for a reason. I wonder what that reason could be?
Didn’t that happen to a young man at Yellowstone a few years ago?
.
yes, well he went pretty far off the wooden sidewalks... turns out hot boiling acidic water WILL kill you after all...
So sad. You would think an 11 year old would know better.
Maybe they weren’t from that area, so the novelty of it all took control of the boy.
This happens in our Yellowstone Park area too, from time to time, in spite of several signs warning not to venture too closely.
It would not surprise me, if over the next decade, these areas were simply gated off, no longer accessible to the public. Liability suits from the bereaved families of irresponsible people would do this very quickly.
Look at what’s happened to most school playgrounds, with the fun stuff (like Monkey Bars or Swings or even Sliding Boards) often being removed.
I guess as a father to a small child I can see trying to rescue him , futile as it may be. Sad, should have had better control of him... but thats why kids are kids I guess.... they do things you cant always control...sad.
I went to Iceland last summer, and they have a set-up like this....trail, fence...around a boiling mud-pit in a volcanic area. Various tourists stopped off and kids were edging up to the pits. I just shook my head...people don’t grasp the danger involved.
It was starting about that age when my kids went completely off the rails, especially Little Miss Lurkin.
Doing better now, but I think they aged me twenty years over the course of ten years.
Me and my family lived in New Zealand from 1982 to 1984 and we visited the volcanic/hot springs area of the mid North Island (Taupo and Rotorua) on a couple of occasions. Dad warned us to keep a safe distance from the boiling mud because he knew a co-worker who in turn had a friend or family member who did not follow this sort of advice on one occasion and was badly scalded or burned by being splattered by the mud.
Then there are the times when there aren’t any barriers. I tell my kids - when I say stay away, you figure out how far back is safe, and double it.
That goes for getting near the edges of dirt cliffs and getting close to large ocean waves.
That’s also how you avoid getting hit right above the eye with the edge of a shovel blade because you were standing right behind the guy using it. Which happened to me when I was five years old.
The other thing is training them to “look” with their eyes, and not their hands.
“You would think an 11 year old would know better.”
Yes, you would. It’s too late for common sense now. They’re gone. But I’d wager that if you could go back and view a video of these people’s rearing of that sterling young lad, you’d find that his incidents of disobeying warnings. going beyond clearly defined limits, barriers, etc., were commonplace. And one day the law of averages jumped up and bit him in the butt. The parents’ frantic efforts to rescue him were powerless and fatal. They should have beaten his ass when he was still trainable. IMHO.
If there’s a sign, somebody did it.
Sometimes culture enters into this kind of behavior. Many times I have witnessed Hispanic immigrant families jay walking across a busy boulevard, walking single file with a toddler in the rear and nobody holding his hand. Nothing in their experience prepared them for life in the developed world.
Hey, no need to drag this family through the mud.
We’ve already got enough dirt on them.
Oh yeah. That was big news here. He got boiled alive in a high acid geyser and his body was dissolved.
If my parents said to stay out of the area, I would have stayed out of the area. End of discussion.
Horrible way to die...
I can’t even imagine...
Same here. My Dad would have said “Look at how upset you’ve made your Mother!”.
When my parents began to refer to each other at ‘Your Mother, or Your Father’, I knew they were very serious. and expected me to be more responsible.
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