St Annes beach where brothers Muhammad and Ali drowned 'usually very safe', says coastguard

Despite an extensive rescue operation by the coastguard, RNLI and police, the brothers, aged 18 and 16, could not be saved

Paul Little, station officer for Lytham coastguard, told coroner Andrew Cousins that in all his years he had never known anyone to die in the sea in that particular area, near St Annes pier.

Muhammad and Ali, who had 'limited swimming ability', got into trouble in the water between 6pm and 7pm on August 15 last year after the rapidly-riding tide filled up gullies on the beach behind them.

On that day, Mr Little said, the coastguard had already been called out five times in the Blackpool area, and were on their way back from another job when they were directed to St Annes at 7.08pm.

"There were a variety of missing children and persons getting cut off on the sand banks," he said.

"We arrived on the scene at 7.16pm. It's a wide expanse of beach; at the time the incident occurred there was probably about three quarters of a mile of beach from the sea to the shore, which was receding as the tide came in.

"It's a very popular beach and can be very busy, particularly last year when less people were travelling abroad, and generally speaking it's a very, very safe beach. We have never had an incident like this previously. There are locations where people do tend to get cut off, but not in this location. There are more places in Blackpool where the tide fills in behind people, whereas in St Annes it's a flat beach.

"There are gullies on the beach and the gullies are typically only about a foot deeper than the rest of the sand."

He told the court that the coastguard service had no concerns about safety in the area prior to the deaths of Muhammad and Ali.

However, the Council has pledged improvements in the area as part of an ongoing £80,000 project to install better safety signs across the coast from Lytham to Blackpool. A new management system has also been put in place to ensure tide timetables in the area are kept up to date, as they were found to be outdated at the time of the deaths.

Ian Curtis, head of governance at Fylde Council, said: "Tides and sand banks are natural features of a coastal landscape and are natural dangers of the coastline that can be warned about but cannot be prevented.... In my submission, the deaths that occurred that day were an accident - a tragic accident, but an accident plain and simple."