I was peacefully eating breakfast before the TV the other morning, the set tuned to "Today". Suddenly there began a report so shocking I nearly spilled my entire bowl of Farina as I jumped out of my seat to grab the Tivo’s remote. I quickly rewound to the beginning of the piece to make certain I hadn’t misheard it.

"Digging that sand hole to China may be a rite of passage for many kids," the reporter, Natalie Morales, began, "but there are risks. In some cases it can collapse and bury your child alive."

I replayed that statement several times, certain that I would hear Ms Morales add "Just kidding!" at the end. I didn’t.

This was bad. This was serious. A major American news organization, once a trusted source of information (though never for me, of course), was apparently now an advocate of the Chicken Little School of Journalism. I could almost hear my mother shouting "You’ll poke your eye out!"

The story had been slipped into a half-hour usually devoted to serious news instead of airing with the lighter pieces later in the show. I never stick around for that fluff, so god knows just how long NBC has been trying to scare people to death this way. There were apparently several reports in this vein aired during the week leading up to the 4th of July. So if any viewers thought they could avoid obscene gas prices by enjoying a little vacation closer to home this year, NBC was doing its best to ruin that for them, too.

The story was about accidents in which someone (usually a child) is digging in the sand at a beach when the sand around them collapses, burying them. But even in their opening statement the network displayed its shoddy research. "Digging that sand hole to China…" indeed. Every kid knows you don’t dig a hole to China at the beach. You dig to China in your backyard. At the beach, you dig to…well, you don’t dig to anywhere. You just dig.

The report consisted of a personal anecdote from a former victim, a few statistics from some guy in a lab coat, and a segment with a lifeguard in which he demonstrated how these accidents happen and what to do when it happens to your kid. Because, Ms. Morales suggested, it will assuredly happen to your child. And soon.

But the personal anecdote turned out to be ten years old . And the lifeguard (well, he wasn’t actually called a ‘lifeguard’–he was part of something called a ‘beach patrol’) had to be at least 75 years old. He seemed to be quite happy to show Ms. Morales just how her child could nearly perish in one of these sand holes before a brave lifegu–I mean, beach patroller–came to the rescue.

But it was the statistics that were quoted that gave me pause. According to the lab coat guy, he had documented 62 cases of sand hole accidents over ten years, 38 of them fatal. Of course, Ms Morales did at one point imply there were probably more than that, saying "…many accidents go unreported… ” But just how anyone would even know of the existence of other accidents if they were unreported is beyond me.

So let’s consider just those 62 cases over ten years and put it in perspective. NBC says sand holes trap people of all ages, but I’ll just stick to kids 14 and under. There are about 46 million of them in the US. So if the sand grabs 6.2 a year–oh, hell, let’s be generous and call it 7–that means the odds are over 6 million to 1 it’ll happen to your kid. Know what’s more likely to get your little Johnny? Malnutrition . Oh, yes, your child has to get past odds of only 4.6 million to 1 to survive that hazard. An even greater danger for Johnny? A hernia . The odds are 943,000 to 1 on that.

And since the odds that Johnny will die of "Complications of medical and surgical care" are only 905,000 to 1, that means that if he does fall in a sand hole, he’s over fifty times more likely to die from the medical care he receives than from the accident itself.

But here’s the topper. The odds are only 57,000 to one that Johnny will drown. So forget what NBC tells you, and let the boy play in the sand.

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