Florida Beach Reopens One Day After Double Shark Attack

Just one day after two people suffered shark bites within five minutes apart in a rare double shark attack, a Fernandina Beach, in Florida, reopened.

According to a CNN report, the city tweeted that the beach was open on Saturday.

“The waters are back open this morning. Ocean Rescue will remain on high alert and will continue monitoring the water.”

The Inquisitr reported that the attacks occurred within one mile of each other on Friday afternoon. The first call came in at 3:35 p.m. ET Friday, and the next happened three minutes later while first responders attended to the first shark bite victim. After the second report, authorities closed the beach, and beachgoers had to leave the area.

In a Facebook post, the City of Fernandina Beach Government said that both patients were stable with non-life threatening injuries, which is good news because sometimes shark attacks have far worse outcomes.

The victims were a 30-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy.

“I was in 2 feet of water or less, laying on my stomach watching (my 8-year-old son) just playing in the surf and I felt something grab onto my foot and pull. I reached down for my foot. I put my hand on his head — he was probably 4 to 5 feet (long) — and when I did that, he shook twice and when I did that he released and left,” Dustin Theobald of Fernandina Beach, the first man bitten, said in an interview.

Theobald experienced damage to his foot in the form of four-inch lacerations and possible tendon injury.

Unfortunately, in Playadina, Florida, a 14-year-old had to be airlifted to Arnold Palmer Children’s Hospital in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday after suffering a possible shark bite, according to a Brevard Times report. The teen’s injury occurred at Playalinda Beach in Brevard County. The Titusville, Florida, teen had been surfing for the very first time when something caused a big gash in on her left thigh.

Crews from both Kennedy Space Center and Brevard County Fire Rescue responded to the incident, which happened on a remote beach. While there’s no official confirmation the injury came from a shark, rescuers believe it was either a shark bite or a bite from another “toothy sea creature.” There’s also a possibility that the gash could’ve come from the girl’s surfboard.

Florida has more than its fair share of shark bite incidents. In fact, in 2017, 58 percent of U.S. shark bites and 35 percent of the world’s shark bites happened in Florida.