A 13-year-old boy who was impaled by a beach umbrella while vacationing in Massachusetts is recovering from his injuries.
On Friday afternoon at approximately 1:40 p.m., firefighters responded to a call from Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, Mass. for a report of a person injured by an umbrella.
When they arrived, the Gloucester Fire Department said first responders learned that a young teenager from Florida had been “struck by an umbrella that had gone airborne” from a gust of wind.
One woman, who works in an emergency room, applied a tourniquet to stem the bleeding in the boy’s shoulder while they waited for first responders to arrive.
“[The] umbrella just hit the kid and we just saw him bleeding,” she told local television station WBZ-TV later that day.
Brandon Phillips, another witness, recalled what he saw that day at the beach.
“All I heard was like a woman scream and then the umbrella went flying so I just went to see, and then he was on the ground just laying down like this, and then his mom’s like ‘Get the lifeguard! Get the lifeguard’” he said.
Firefighters said the boy was impaled in his left shoulder and bleeding badly.
In a statement, the fire department said the boy was transported by ambulance to hospital with serious, but not life-threatening, injuries.
Lt. Nick Oullette of the Gloucester Fire Department said bystanders were “surprisingly calm” considering what happened.
“For such a rare occurrence, people were quite calm,” he said.
Fire Chief Eric Smith also described the incident as a “rare occurrence” in an email to CTVNews.ca.
First responders told WBZ-TV the boy is expected to be OK and that it was a “freak accident.” They said they don’t typically respond to incidents such as this one.
