A beach umbrella almost killed a Richmond man; now he works to make them safer

RICHMOND, Va. – For the past nine years, Richmonder Ed Quigley has been working to raise awareness about beach umbrella safety.

In 2015, Quigley was vacationing with his family at Bethany Beach in Delaware, when he was impaled in the eye by a windblown beach umbrella.

"I was sitting in a low beach chair, and my brother-in-law yelled, there's an umbrella coming out of the sand," said Quigley. "And I turned to my left, and the umbrella just picked up and turned on its end, and the pole of the umbrella went through my left eye. It breached the brain cavity, broke some bones here, shattered the eye socket, it was pretty bad. I had to have brain surgery."

Since then, Quigley has been working with the American Society for Testing and Materials to develop a safety standard for beach umbrellas.

He's hoping to raise awareness, and he says the biggest thing safety advice he can give beach go-ers is to ensure your umbrella includes some sort of anchoring device.

"You can't just put the pole in the sand to be safe," said Quigley.

The Richmonder worked to help create the safety label that shows the dangers of beach umbrellas after senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine wrote letters to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

"It has a fairly gruesome graphic on it, and it shows some blood," Quigley noted. "And the reason for that, we had an expert from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who helped design this label, and the reason that it has that graphic is because this is so serious people need to take it seriously. And if you go to the beach and just figured well, it's never happened to me. It might, and that's the problem."

Quigley also says you should always be cautious when you are at the beach and always ensure your umbrella is properly anchored into the sand so that you can prevent the same incident from happening to you.

For more information on beach umbrella safety, you can visit Quigley's official website here: https://www.beachumbrellasafety.org/ .

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