Spot the Drowning Child (2015)
spotthedrowningchild.com
spotthedrowningchild.com
I remember having the presence of mind to yell out help before blanking out. My closest friend in the troop luckily turned around, swam back to and drug me back to shore.
I was scared of the water after that, but some how ended up fighting my fear and earning the swimming merit badge, which for a weak swimmer, was no easy task.
For his heroism, and because I had overcome my near death experience, we were both recognized for embodying different aspects of scouting.
That incident in the lake inspired my friend to go on to become a life-guard.
Both my kids started swim lessons in infancy, and my oldest son gets compliments for his swimming skills while at the public pool. Though the pool we use has life guards, I never for a second take my eyes of my kids.
Maybe one day they'll go on to be life guards prior to college.
Turns out our mandatory swimming lessons from the age of 8 weren't as useless as I thought.
It's not nearly as fast as "proper" swimming but I'm sure I could keep it up approximately as long as I could walk. Maybe even longer. It makes for a great option in dangerous situations, and is likely a good fundamental technique to teach anyone just learning.
Nethertheless: I did this in the ocean once about 200m off the shore (at that point I wasn’t really in trouble and just wanted a rest) and the waves were too high and I ended up eating a lot of salt water and nearly choking and sinking. It put me in a far worse situation than had I stayed off my back.
Some of us literally sink if we don’t swim.
One time my friend looked at me in awe as I laid on my back, relaxed, and sunk. We tried it over and over again. I was as curious as she was. She had to put her hands under my body to keep my body above water. When she removed her hands I’d begin to submerge, just laying on my back, arms stretched out, until I was fully underwater. But she did the same and she would float.
I wasn’t tense, but rather relaxed and not panicking, since I could swim (the only way I know to stay afloat) and knew she was right there. And I mean, not that hard to just lie there calm and relaxed. I have to actively swim in order to stay afloat. And I’m not the only one..
Although strangely enough dead bodies float so what’s up with that?
Decomposition produces a variety of gases that increase buoyancy.
I have very high density fat. Although I’m more than 100 pounds overweight, I still sink like a rock when I get into the pool and exhale. If I inhale a lot of air into my lungs, I can usually keep my nose and mouth barely above water, but not much more.
In contrast, my wife is also overweight, but her fat is low density. There is nothing I have found that is capable of making her sink.
The times we have gone snorkeling, I have no problems diving and I have to work to surface. But she can’t dive for love or money, although she can get her face fully under water.
These 2 things are the difference for me between sinking & floating. Mostly tilting my head further back though.
Of course this fails miserably with even the smallest waves.
That said I learned to properly tread water while getting my open water SCUBA cert and turns it it's really easy. Last time I tried, from completely fresh, I was able to tread water for 40 minutes before I got bored and quit. I probably could have done it for another 40 minutes, at least. This was in a pool though so I was relaxed and the water was calm.
If the ocean isn't too rough, and you conserve your energy for dealing with waves, this works pretty well.
Something I learned as part of the swimming merit badge :)
I was paddling with my 3 year old daughter by the shore while my 9 year old was playing with his cousin futher up the beach (and in front of the lifeguard station).
My father-in-law (late 60's) wanted to join the two 9 year olds who had swam a short distance to a sandbar, and were in knee depth water.
The old man got into difficulty, I dropped my daughter back with the family and asked my wife to have a look at her old man.
She said he was fine, he's been swimming here for years.
I recognised the pattern of short quick breaths and short quick movements. Each small wave was sapping energy from him.
I ran to help and reached him quickly. People nearby had recognised the danger but were too afraid of stepping out of their depth to help a stranger. Ultimately, nobody on the crowded beach was prepared to take any risk to themselves to help (which I can understand).
On arrival, I realised I did not know what to do. I held him above the water for a few seconds, which meant submerging myself for the same duration. He was now a dead-weight, who had lost all control. I repeated this twice more, until I felt there was a risk to my own safety.
I swam/dragged/paddled/crawled with one arm the short (12 meters) to shore. I was close to becoming exhausted myself.
Later that night over a bbq, the family asked why he simply did not turn around. The time between tiring, and panicking/exhausting he said was too short, and he was so close to reaching the sandbar.
My wife did not believe he had been in danger until that chat over the bbq.
He is alive today because one member of the family recognise the signs of drowning. Being inclose proximity to the lifeguard station which was manned, had no bearing on the outcome.
Stories of parents turning the back for a split second, only to see their kid missing is the norm.
A scary moment like that reaffirms what you said--it's too easy for something terrible to happen. I've experienced it too, just not in a pool.
I'm glad your child is safe.
Never take your eyes off your kids.
Thankfully some other people were also going from boat to shore with us, on a raft, and were close enough that I could shout at them to come pick us up.
I don’t plan on ever trying that again!
I never did learn CPR. Maybe this is the year.
A few years ago, I took a class taught through my employer at the time (VMWare) and got recertified. It had been more than thirty years, but not that much had changed.
CPR isn’t hard. Spotting the drowning person, that’s the hard thing.
I was hundreds of meters from the shore when I finally admitted to myself I was exhausted.
Made it back fine, but made me much more cautious about swimming in fresh water.
this is probably a good example of why this system exists.
I rescued quite a few children, it's hard to see in this video because the video quality is poor and the camera is at an angle that is worse than what the lifeguard in the video is seeing. Overall this victim is fairly active and should not have been very hard to spot in person for a well trained lifeguard. (And they did spot the child.)
This is a weird video because:
There are lifeguard(s) but yet the pool is full of non coast-guard approved tubes and floatation devices such. Most places with well trained lifeguards would not allow this. They don't work, can be more dangerous than no PFD, and they make it harder for the lifeguards to see. The worst drowning incident I witnessed involved a child in a tube who got flipped upside down and couldn't get out of the tube or flip back over. (I was not a lifeguard yet when I saw that.)
I think things from my perspective are in a terrible state in terms of water safety compared to 20 years ago.
Something must have changed with insurance liability, as most places just don't even have lifeguards. Resort pools I see these days are designed in a way where sight lines are so poor lifeguards/parents cannot even see children in the pools unless they are in the pool and stay within 10ft of the child. Very different than things used to be. Pool designers have reduced depth & eliminated diving boards resulting in a false sense of security. Meanwhile the pools are no longer even sufficient to be used for teaching up to a point where a person can be considered a swimmer. I just got back from vacation and the resort we stayed at had a pool which absolutely terrified me. I was 100% in lifeguard mode the entire time my child was in the pool, and the pool was so bad I couldn't sit in one spot and see him, I had to walk the edge of the pool to maintain sight lines. (The pool in the video is not like this FWIW)
Fewer young people are supposedly physically fit and able to get to advanced swimming levels and pass tough standards like Red Cross. There are fewer places that even have Red Cross accredited programs these days as a result. Red Cross level instructors command high pay, and most places teaching swimming lessons these days are money making businesses that pay instructors near minimum wage and try to make the franchise owner wealthy. This is a relatively large change from non-profit Red Cross programs back in the day.
Red Cross has always refused to act as insurance for pools/resorts/water parks, and alternate private organizations now certify lower quality lifeguards & swim instructors and we have new things like "Shallow Water lifeguards" that can be paid minimum wage. These alternate private certification orgs train to a lower level but do act as insurance so they're very attractive.
I have a 7 year old, he's been through 4 private orgs so far. None have had Red Cross accredited programs. All of them have been super expensive but they're the only choice available. 3 of them did not have deep enough water and their instructors were not trained at a level for teaching to a full "Swimmer" level. None of the programs seem to focus on water safety and have strange practices like trying to teaching 5 year olds the butterfly and other high energy/low safety strokes without teaching elementary backstroke, breaststroke, sidestroke, etc.. which are more useful in emergency water situations. Most of the instructors I've seen teaching my child show poor enough form they'd have not passed a Water Safety course 20 years ago.
The whole thing is a giant mess. I have been considering getting re-certified to take over finishing my child's swimming lessons, but the course is hard to take these days. Which also explains why not enough 16-20 year olds manage to take it. And there are almost no pools left to use that are not privately owned and have deep enough water.
Also at least by the old standards when someone who was a Red Cross WSI calls someone a swimmer we're talking about a pretty high level. Someone who can't swim for 30 minutes to safety in deep water is not necessarily a swimmer IMO. Maybe standards have reduced. But that was a requirement at one point. And this is not something that requires elite physical fitness or stamina when you are trained to swim well. Some of the strokes are barely more physically taxing than walking if you're proficient. Non swimmers get a false idea about this because they mostly see competitive swimming which uses the taxing/fast strokes.
I am amazed at how few of my early millennial peers have never heard of the elementary backstroke.
I watch my kid's lessons and I'm sure I didn't see it being shown to them. They got into what I google as "backstroke" straight away, without the "elementary" phase.
I don't think I was ever taught it. I think I just discovered it playing around in the water one day.
When I want to play around, I try swimming backwards. On my back, with my feet straight ahead and motionless, I stroke backwards with my arms so I move in the direction my feet are pointing.
They never taught the “Elementary Backstroke” to us, even though this was Wilmington, NC and we were just fifteen minutes from the beach.
The backstroke I learned was more like the crawl, just done on your back. After a while, I stopped bothering to use my arms and did a lazy backstroke using just my legs. I could do that for hours on end. The lazy backstroke wasn’t YWCA approved, but it worked well in the ocean and in pools. The only danger was that you couldn’t see what you might be about to hit.
Likely, it was never standard think to teach.
I suspect that it was never taught for competition, partly because of its energy efficiency through low performance.
I also wonder if it's more common around lakes and oceans; as it's great for going over waves with minimum energy.
These are for fun devices. They are not meant for life saving and they attract people to pool with waves.
Typically, lifeguards do police rules, but don't police inflatables or ordinary size.
> I have a 7 year old, he's been through 4 private orgs so far. None have had Red Cross accredited programs. All of them have been super expensive but they're the only choice available. 3 of them did not have deep enough water and their instructors were not trained at a level for teaching to a full "Swimmer" level.
Either you are exaggerating or was extraordinary unlucky or live in pretty bad area. My 6 years old trains in deep water after she learned to float as 5 years old in kindergarten. Kindergarten part is pretty standard. Kids able to float training in water where they can swim are standard to, other peoples kids who go to swim train like that too.
> None of the programs seem to focus on water safety and have strange practices like trying to teaching 5 year olds the butterfly and other high energy/low safety strokes without teaching elementary backstroke, breaststroke, sidestroke,
I doubt elementary backstroke and sidestroke were ever common things to teach. Breaststroke yes, but these two not. I was not taught that either. I also find dubious 5 year old doing butterfly - they may do some fun exercises potentially leading to that, but not butterfly itself.
I was lucky as a kid, my parents kept sending me to swim lessons until I finally got it. I learned early how to do a side stroke, which is so relaxing you can keep it up all day.
Another important lesson I learnt that sometimes when someone is rescued from drowning, they are at the risk of secondary drowning which can occur during sleep after the accident. Especially, if a child looks very weak and tired after a drowning accident, it is important to keep the child under medical care for the next 24 hours. Never take the risk of the taking the child back home in such a case.
Films must show you something interesting, and watching somebody do trial and error painfully on a bash script for 6 hours is not as fun as a fast pace keyboard murder while screaming "i just passed 3 firewalls" with beautiful animations rendering on the screen.
If there is a camera, what you see is a lie. The difference between a national geographic documentary and cinema is just how big the lie is.
It's a bit insiduous actually, because some parts of the lie are subtil: rythm, speed, dialogs, personalities, agenda, resources... But they look real enough to make our natural social mechanisms trigger, and the lie then creeps into real life.
Like people now expect the police, the justice system, school or the hospital to behave in a certain way, and the reality is way less glamourous.
The chances we actually find, or even search for somebody that killed you (if it's not very obvious) are very low, not to mention a simple theft or ass kicking.
Most things are mondain and boring looking. That's why we are so fond of art.
And drowning is like most things.
Intraspecies rape and infanticide is pretty common out there. (Look up the penis of drakes (male ducks) and why it looks the way it does at some point)
Siblings competing for food with only a small percentage surviving.
The female tit (the bird ... not what you think) basically cheats so much that there is a possibility that none of the offspring is actually of the male that feeds them ...
The list goes on and on and on ...
Pretty sure "cheating" and infidelity are largely human concepts. That's normal and natural behaviour for many species.
It is normal behavior, yes. But it comes at the expense of the cheated on party. The term here is "parental investment" and is roughly how much energy a party has to invest in the offspring.
If the male tit builds the nest and provides food for offspring that is genetically not his it puts it at a disadvantage and it is definitely exploited by the female.
Not to one-up you, but anyone who's at it anyway, also look up the platypus mating behavior. Spoiler: it involves 4-headed penises.
That's exactly what the OP said.
Our reluctance to produce informative graphic media has given people an unrealistically optimistic view of nature and life. This has warped social values and policy to our detriment.
My daughter, when she was about 2, fell over in about 2 feet of water in a lake and it was completely and utterly silent. One moment she was there and the next she was under and reaching up at me, bubbles coming out of her mouth. If I had been even remotely distracted I never would have known that she had gone under.
I learned that day how non-obvious drowning looks. I still feel bad about it to this day, even though he ended up being alright.
Both events are very rare. They make up only 1%-2% of all drownings, says pediatrician James Orlowski, MD, of Florida Hospital Tampa. [1]
[1] https://www.webmd.com/children/features/secondary-drowning-d...
Also we don't know how many near-drownings vs drownings there are. Lot of good statistical quiz questions in here.
No, it is not as simple as "leftover water from the drowning". Rather, due to the presence of the water in the lungs, which has been presumably expelled entirely, the interior of the lungs becomes irritated and inflamed.
This inflammation process produces it's own fluid which will slowly fill the lungs and "drown" you - especially while you are prone, while sleeping, wherein the fluid pools along the entire length of the lung, rather than just filling up the bottom of the lung.
It's a misleading term ...
But overall their message was the same, post drowning, go to hospital.
https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/recreation/swimming-spl... (see "Important Information")
The presence of children with no swimming ability in the deep end of a crowded pool in this video seems like an obvious recipe for disaster.
edit: toys and floats are allowed in Toronto public pools, the kids have quite a lot of fun with them.
Even knowing that in this short clip there is absolutely someone drowning I still have doubt, but the lifeguard who doesn’t have that context is already half way to the person by the time I’m sure.
They have also been staring at the same pool for hours and their brain is ignoring all the visual noise that is distracting you. They also have the benefit of stereo vision and sound.
> They have also been staring at the same pool for hours and their brain is ignoring all the visual noise that is distracting you.
I'd suspect mental fatigue would counteract any benefits you'd get from increased filtering. Which, I assume, is why life guards are generally rotated regularly.
> They also have the benefit of stereo vision and sound.
Sound might not be of much help here because drowning is usually something that happens quietly (as the linked site also explains).
Drownings in progress are often quiet, but that doesn't mean there aren't useful audio cues (splashing that stops, a kid who is no longer laughing or shouting, etc)
In general, I would assume, like with driving, the job of the lifguard is a bit automatic, where the mind on its own filters out the ones, which might need stronger attention.
Also helps that in this instance, most have rubber rings and if you see an empty rubber ring, that in itself would trigger concerns and focus.
It was very boring, and keeping my mental acuity sharp towards the end of shifts was a problem. Take care swimming late in the day.
Also, I don't ever swim in public pools anyone. We had to shut down the cast member pool one 4th of July because it was so dirty and so soiled, we couldn't see to the bottom of the deep end (6 feet / ~2m) and it presented a drowning hazard. The pool was closed for like 3 days after that while we waited for the water turbidity to go down.
In theory a public pool under proper management should be cleaner than a private pool which almost certainly isn’t being professionally managed.
Chlorine in pH balanced water with the right hardness is surprisingly effective. Pro tip, if you can smell “chlorine” it probably means the pool is dirty and doesn’t have enough chlorine left in the water. The smell is not chlorine in the water, it’s the result of the chlorine burning off as it oxidizes contaminants.
Guards typically have discrete areas they cover, and within those boundaries you can check for a certain number of people and boundary crossings. By doing things like mentally running through the list/number of people in your area and noting the higher-risk ones, it's a little less mentally taxing than you might think. Combined with some overlap between guard stations and regular rotations between areas, coverage can be pretty good. The real difficulty comes in when you start adding numbers of people- the boundaries become less clear, the number of high-risk swimmers increase, and the total cycle time through everyone you're covering increases such that your margin of error between a situation presenting and your time to react starts decreasing.
Anecdotally, I always found the behavior changes from a normal to tired swimmer to be one of the easier parts. Lack of forward motion, intense focus on the activity of swimming itself, falling behind from a group. Again, it's more difficult the more crowded an area becomes.
https://youtu.be/Gka9TFwqoVs?t=60 https://youtu.be/FTtHOZfV_qA?t=47 https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/drowning-detection-sy... https://swimeye.com/
1) I was already primed to find someone drowning; I knew based on the video title that there was someone in danger. For a lifeguard, it's probably common that they'll go through entire shifts without having to jump in.
2) Even after identifying the right kid, I had doubt: I wasn't 100% sure until the lifeguard jumped in and confirmed my choice.
We turned away for what only seemed a minute and he was going under. He was slightly blue in the face when the life guard brought him out.
The weird thing is he didn't fight or flail. He just sort of faded away into the water, and it struck me as especially weird that he didn't seemed scared at all after.
It has haunted me ever since just how easy it can be for a child to drown. Many swim lessons for my child later, I still watch him like a hawk and insist on life jackets in any moving water conditions.
Bondi Rescue, a series on Netflix about a team of Australian lifeguards, is instructive and entertaining.
How would you rater you 7-yo swimming ability when this happened? For example could he swim 20 meters (~60 ft)?
Also I might watch that Netflix thanks. I don't go to Bondi much but Manly beach a few km away is interesting. They are always yelling at people who are swimming in the dangerous current area and it takes several whistles to get them out. I usually give 'em a gentle yell too if I am there on a surf board :-)
In my case it was because there were so many people in the pool that I could barely move, after struggling to breathe a few moments I had to exert myself to climb up someone else's inner tube to gain my breath. But I do recall spending most of my time barely above water and struggling to breathe. Could have gone very bad.
If you're a new parent and haven't heard this advice before, this is one of the key takeaways. It also applies any time young kids are playing out of sight. If your kid is in their room and it gets quiet longer than usual, it's a good idea to go peek in on them.
> One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you alright?” If they can answer at all – they probably are.
When I was a kid, I spent a few summers learning to sail. Part of our training included responding to falling overboard or capsizing our small boats with crews of two. Our instructors insisted that whenever this happened we first call out to each other, "Are you okay?" and confirm it before attempting to right the boat. I never understood why, but now I do.
Anyone who didn't do so was instantly hauled out of the pool and sent to the medic. Which was good, because some of the men were unconscious when they got there, though they still passed the test! The requirements were to swim down, touch the far wall, swim back, touch the near wall, all while remaining underwater. State of consciousness was never specified :)
Yes, that doesn't look great - I assumed when I saw it was underwater that it was effectively looking up at the people on the surface and detecting people in distress from that angle. On closer inspection that doesn't seem to be the case.
Even the camera manufacturer wouldn't be immune from defending themselves.
Welcome to America.
When I took a 5yo to a pool which had multiple lifeguards I put her in a lifejacket and stayed within arm's reach of her. Playing in a pool is great fun but it is very high stakes. No way I am going to leave a child in such a dangerous situation and hope it works out. Making sure your child survives a trip to a pool is your responsibility.
It'd be a tool that can warn the lifeguards in the event that they didn't notice the drowning, not the only thing that monitors the pool.
Without the rings non-swimmers couldn't get into trouble but swimmers have less fun. You could also pave over the pool with concrete and remove the hazard entirely - no fun for swimmers but all risks of drowning removed.
Parents are a huge part of the issue. PFDs give them a false sense of security where they feel like they don't have to watch their kid. The best change my old pool ever made was banning them (besides USCG approved life vests). The rafts were almost never an issue unless parents stuck their kid in the middle and stopped supervising (which happened a lot and we'd yell at the about). Crappy parental supervision is the cause of most problems at pools.
Swimming is one of the few activities that children engage in which can go so wrong as to end up in their death. I would suggest that it is borderline negligence for a parent to put a child in such a dangerous situation without proper precautions (supervision). I wouldn't let a small child I am responsible for go into a pool alone regardless of the presence of lifeguards. Especially not a wave pool.
You would. Let me give you the scenario: you're home alone with the three kids, you've been chasing them around, doing laundry, cleaning up spilled grape juice, telling Jenny to stop cutting Tommy's hair, etc. Finally, you think everyone is down for a nap. You turn on the game. 5 minutes later, 5 minutes, you think "It's too quiet...". You get up and walk around for a couple minutes to find 4 year-old Sally's door open. No Sally. Where's Sally? Sprint around the house, run down to the kitchen, look in the back yard, and she's face down in the pool. You immediately get her out, desperate. You realize you have to separate from her to call 911. She's been unaccounted for by now for 12 minutes.
The paramedics get a breath back, but anoxic brain injury has set in. She dies, tubes in every orifice, 3 days later.
I have seen this play out more than once. My parents had a pool. I was a lifeguard, have made rescues. I was also on swim team, I'm in the Navy now, and I'm a physician. I surf, I dive, I do open ocean swimming and triathlons. I've helped rescue a diver in pulmonary edema. I think I wouldn't leave my kid unattended, but I know I might.
I've met the parents. They wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone either.
Climbing trees (fall risk)
Climbing tall playground equipment (I broke my arm falling from a height of just 3 feet once, on one of those). Broken neck, etc.
Playing in the street (cars)
Bicycling (can get hit by a car, sigh)
Trampoline (don't get me started)
Exploring (falling down deep wells, etc.)
The Gashlycrumb Tinies is not just a morbid story about impossible deaths. Living is dangerous, living young possibly especially so!
An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.
Those are widely considered NOT safe, a non-swimmer child is probably much safer without them than with them, as using them lulls the caregiver into a false sense of security and they pay much less attention to them. They also teach children the wrong posture for swimming/floating, which can be difficult to unlearn. In the US the common wisdom says that if you use them you must be in arms reach of the child at all times - but that's what you'd do without them anyway, so what's the point?
The idea that you'd leave a non-swimmer child unattended with them is, frankly, horrifying.
Is it possible you are thinking of something like Puddle Jumpers (look up an image online), which look like water wings but strap behind the child's back, and don't actually inflate? Those are, indeed, considered safe.
They are just often misused - you are supposed to be supervising them when they are in the pool period and they only need deep enough water to keep their feet off the ground.
Flotation devices have no part to play in teaching how to swim. Parents (or teachers) holding their children and teaching them how to float is step 1. Only after the child can handle themselves in water (float, know when to breathe) should they be playing with flotation devices.
Previous attempts to teach me to swim used flotation devices. Without them, I was terrified of drowning.
A very smart swimming teacher, seeing my fear, taught me to float on my back, first with her assistance, then without it. Once I could float, she taught me to swim backwards, froggy style. I was afraid even about that, but she said "If you ever find yourself unable to swim, just float!" and I felt confident to do that.
From there, I was comfortable swimming on my front, because once again, I knew how to go on my back and float!
Then the rest was simple skill acquisition.
30 years later, I wish I knew the name of that swim instructor!
And one skill that swimmers need, but cannot really get with an float-assist device, is putting their face in the water. I watched an adult friend learn to swim, and this was REALLY hard for him. Crazy enough - he was ex-Royal Navy submariner, so he had passed basic water survival - he could float on his back, just couldn't do anything beyond that.
You can’t swim with a lifejacket. You can only float (and in a position that is different from how you would naturally float in water).
We used kickboards for this exact purpose. So you can float face down with arms outstretched holding the board. You can transition to freestyle swimming taking one hand off the board at a time.
As an anecdote, they almost killed a friend's daughter a few years ago.
She had jumped and fallen forward, and her arm floaties moved her buoyancy to her stomach-area, forcing her face into the water. Scary stuff.
She was even in a swimming pool she could stand in.
Also, when I was a lifeguard, one of the things that was sometimes hard to get to parents' heads is that "supervising" a non-swimmer does not mean sitting on the side of the pool reading a book--it's being in the water no more than an arm's length of the nonswimmer. Every second is critical in a drowning incident, so having a parent less than a meter away will almost always do a better job rescuing a kid than a lifeguard in preventing an accident
The reason for worn (handheld is a different story) flotation devices other than lifevests is to sell flotation devices; I've never found anyone who teaches swimming to children (or adults, but that's not the market for them anyway) that uses them, advises using them, or considers them anything other than a safety hazard.
If you want to get a kid used to “preswimming”, which as I've seen it is actually something mostly done with infants and toddlers (older nonswimmers usually seem to go straight from wall exercises to supervised short swimming with knowledgeable teachers) it's best to do it with an adult holding them, except for extremely brief transitions.
When I went to Cornell, learning to swim was a mandatory requirement. If you didn't pass the "swim 2 laps" swim test they gave you right off the bat, your first assigned P.E. class would be a swim class. (Apparently, one of the large Cornell donors stipulated this as part of his donation. Possibly, someone in their immediate family had died due to lack of being able to swim.)
You say you don't look good in a bathing suit? Swimming will teach you not to care. Hell, if you're heavy, staying close to the water surface is actually easier. And you can get great exercise WITHOUT putting the stress on your joints that pretty much every other exercise will do to you if you're heavy. (Note: I'm a bit overweight, so I get it. I get it.)
Did I mention it's fun? If you're an adult, you will feel like a kid again.
You say you don't live near a coast? Well, when you go on vacation and are near a beach, you can actually go into the water fearlessly! And surely, there's a pool of some sort nearby.
Don't be afraid. Don't care what others think. Please consider it.
It's a shame that swimming/water survival aren't a part of school in the US. Knowing how to tread water and doggy paddle are valuable, life-saving skills.
Most (all?) of us could already "swim" basically, since there were lakes and rivers near the small towns and kids usually got free swimming lessons around age 5. The bigger lessons were about the various (then) standard strokes, pool safety and basic lifesaving, how not to accidentally kill yourself on a diving board, swimming laps instead of just swimming around, etc.
I absolutely hated it (too many strangers, why didn't we have our own pool, my endurance was crappy, I was afraid of the deep) -- but I'm glad they made us do it instead of letting us wimp out.
Most pools here allow for non/bad swimmers to go where they want, with what they...under the absolute condition to have a good swimmer with them, all the time.
A small kid straying alone in the pool is already an alert and the pool staff will get the kid out of the water on the spot, with no reentry. Here the kids are big enough that they could be swimming by themselves, so for me the blame is on the parents for not being there, even if it was for just a minute.
Most Wave pools are at resorts/water parks which typically do not necessarily even employ fully trained/high skill lifeguards.
They often rely on private certification programs that will train "shallow water lifeguards" who do not have to have a full set of swimming & rescue skills. They do tend to have good training for spinal injuries though.
Add in that these resorts are most attractive to non-swimmers and they are hopelessly crowded and it is a dangerous mix.
Places like Great Wolf Lodge scare the daylights out of me as a former lifeguard/WSI.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...
[1] http://78.136.22.110/europe/info/switzerland/switzerland-dro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_lessons#Switzerland
Not being able to swim is viewed as "having a bit of a handicap" that you should fix as soon as possible.
When you are with your kids near a swimming pool or the sea, keep your eyes glued on them.
My rule is "never break line of sight" (I borrowed the term from Assassin's Creed where if you break line of sights from the guards chasing you for a few seconds, their aggro switches off).
Line of sight. When near water opt in for a nice podcast/audio book and keep your eyes on your kids. A lifeguard is scanning the scene but on a 50 kids, you are most likely to spot something like this faster/sooner. Also while looking at your kids, you automatically scan/cover an area of 10-15sqm.
Although he was wearing those kids armbands, they were useless as they were keeping his head underwater (he fell head first).
The whole thing took less than 5 seconds, but it was really frightening in retrospect.
Do not break line of sight.
That's an actual law with children in Australia, idk about the rest of the world. <5 years old within arms reach, <10 years old within line of sight.
When you are at a pool / lake / sea with a kid that cannot swim, keep them in arms reach.
I'm going to swim with my 2 year old daughter for the first time this Saturday, so this being linked on HN was a chilling reminder. What I'm mostly scared about is that she gets some kind of temper tantrum whilst being in the water.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_sight_(video_games)
This can be surprisingly non-obvious.
A 5-ish year old walking around and splashing at the beach. In shallow below-knee water. With shallow above-knee surf. No worries.
Gets knocked down. Repeated wave impacts, unstable sand, water hitting face, struggle to breathe air and not water. They're unable to stand up again. Keep trying and falling. And then not trying.
The parent was a couple meters away, watching, interpreting this as play. Bystanders stepped in. Intervention was trivially easy. Parent criticized kid for fooling around. So even afterwards, it was non-obvious they had been watching their kid drown.
Perhaps if you don't have experience where the challenge to breathing isn't absence of air, but the presence of too much water mixed into it?
It'd be a lot harder in real life, when you don't know if there's going to be a drowning kid.. being prepared is half the game.
Except it was at highwater now, so my head ended up I'd say almost a foot under water. I landed on the bottom and managed to contain my panic enough to kick off and angle myself so I'd go towards shore and not away from it. In the end I was fine, but a lifeguard watching me would've been caught totally unawares.
However she said kids don't usually die in their pool, they die in their grandparents pool.
food for thought.
Being a lifeguard in a pool is clearly tough enough; being in charge of a stretch of sand with people moving in and out constantly has to be absolutely insane. Especially since a kid could run in, get smashed by a wave, and be underwater in the time you spent glancing down the beach the other way.
I still have flashes of memories of looking back at the shore and it being quite far but not abnormally far. I just remember treading water for a pretty long time and having to signal the lifeguards with my arms. I'm happy they came eventually.
If the place is fully staffed and well managed the beach vehicles shouldn't be needed cause the lifeguards should be close enough to not need them. Most places I've seen ATVs in use the ATVs were being used by volunteers who were not lifeguards but watch the beach and call the coast guard/lifeguards on the phone if there is an emergency. The main beach I see this at is ultra dangerous with cold water, dangerous undertows, thousands of harbor seals in the water, and now has occasional great white sharks hunting the seals!
Making a beach safe enough requires a lot of well trained lifeguards. Not many beaches are ever staffed like that.
If it's dangerous enough some of the guards might need to be in the water on personal watercraft. Usually I've only seen this in super dangerous surfing locations though.
A full lifeguard training program also typically contains training on using a rescue board which is basically like a surfboard and can be super useful in ocean surf.
Baywatch was always super funny.. they carried Rescue Buoys which were near obsolete in favor of Rescue Tubes by the 90s. (The rescue tube is flexible and can be clipped into a circle once you reach the victim.) But the scenes on Baywatch would have realistically often have been done with both a rescue buoy + a rescue board.
Ocean surf is super dangerous, water temps can be dangerous at the ocean. Then in some places you've got sharks, jellyfish, coral reefs.
It's super intimidating compared to working a pool.
I speak as somebody who trained to be a lifeguard in the UK - taking the bronze medallion #1 and whilst in intensive and in depth (having to know the four chambers of the heart as well as full CPR...) course with lots of practical exam parts, awareness that this gives you is something you can not learn from books and is hard to roleplay.
#1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Medallion_(United_Kingd...
I don't want to replace lifeguards or increase their workload by spreading them thinner, but want to find out if we complement them together whether or not it would increase detection rates and lives saved. However, if the current state of the art performs abysmally compared to lifeguards, then I have doubt whether or not they can be combined for improved outcomes.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=machine...
Here's a shortlist of systems for pools: Coral Manta, SwimEye, Mobotix, Axis, AngelEye, Argusmatik, Poseidon, Zwembadcamera, Optoswim, Dipsee A.I., and Lynxight Deep Vision.
For beaches there's: Milestone, Coastalcoms, etc., and two of the above companies also do beaches: Dipsee A. I., and Lynxight Deep Vision.
Lifeguarded during high school. It's hard, even in a small pool.
For those not deeply familiar with U.S. structural issues regarding race, a random viewing of the video will show the unfortunately, the victim/rescued person is likely to be African-American. The reasons for this are complex and sad.
Anecdotally, as a child, my family wasn't well off (and at least once homeless), and for a while lived in a lower class urban neighborhood that just happened to have a nice public pool. However, I know that my swimming education started as a toddler with my mother taking me to the local recreation center for early swim classes. Later when I was maybe 6 or 7 my older brother, a champion high school swimmer, further reinforced this until I was very comfortable in the water and had no problems even at the bottom of the deepest parts of the pool. All through my early, middle and high school years I had countless opportunities to swim, and to learn new skills around water. When I was 17 I could easily complete a mile-long endurance swim, or pull a bucket of rocks 20 feet up off the bottom of a pitch black lake.
My African-American friends, starting way back at that housing complex, had no such similar experience. I remember long summer days with my friends teaching our black friends to swim so we could have more fun in the pool as a group. As children, it wasn't entirely unusual that one of us kids couldn't swim, as maybe their parents just hadn't gotten around to teaching them, so we took it upon ourselves -- never really noticing the pattern that only our black friends hadn't learned to swim yet. What we didn't understand is that most of their parents would never teach them, as many of them in fact couldn't swim either or discouraged it for various reasons -- creating a generational problem.
Now, older, I've come to see and understand the sadness of the situation and hope it continues to be addressed in a more systematic way.
Please, if you can't swim, learn to. Teach your children or have your children taught. Water sports are tons of fun, but your safety is mostly on your ability to swim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjC2Ucpr__E
Another place I worked was in a very privileged town at a very large country club. They did a lot of corporate events where the pool was hired out by a company for their party. We would never get through corporate events without multiple rescues if the company had a lot of employees who lived in the city without access to pools & swim lessons.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=902136...
A girl a few years older than I was was able to swim across and push me up. I remember there were two “chaperones” who were just a few feet away from the edge of the pool but they were both facing away.
Terrifying experience, still remember it vividly. Parents kind of laughed it off but I definitely could have died. Definitely teach your kids to swim properly before letting them go to a pool unsupervised is all I’ll say.
This worked, though:
<iframe id="player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" title="YouTube video player" width="854" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T5mDQeDkca0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>I kind of assumed that was intentional, since the lifeguard can’t make it full screen or zoom in either. :)
Maybe? There is a
allowfullscreen="1"
Also interesting to note that there are many people really close by who do not notice the drowning, but spring into action to help once the lifeguard jumped.
OK, what the hell is a kid doing in the deep end who cannot f*ing swim? A large flotation ring is NOT a life preservation device!
Seems like it would make an interesting CV/ML project
This system is "trained to detect people under-water" and in the demo it only starts beeping after about 6 seconds of no movement while the person is on the bottom of the pool. So the person first has to get exhausted, sink, stop moving, and then the system catches on that something is wrong. I guess if you get oxygen into the person fast enough, they can make a full recovery, but in the context of a pool this should not replace lifeguards. At home, this is better than nothing, though I wonder if actual (near-)drownings would go up or down because of the sense of security.
Edit: the About page confirms it:
> Without air in your lungs, your body sinks [...] For children, irreversible damage to the brain tissues typically starts to occur after about 4-5 minutes without oxygen, (for adults it is after about 3-4 minutes). $product detects when a person sinks, meaning seconds after she or he stopped breathing
Detecting people that have gotten lungs full of water and are unconscious at the bottom of a pool is better than not detecting that, but it doesn't sound like pool guard or proper parenting can be replaced just yet, even if it might be a helpful last-resort aid.
Every kid should be taught this.
- Swimming with clothes on after an unexpected fall into the water, able to orient themselves above water and leave the water independently.
- Enter the water in different ways, can orient themselves and proceed to swim through something.
- Can use one or more of the 4 basic strokes (breaststroke, single backstroke, front crawl, back crawl) to swim a base distance
- Can float on his back and stomach. Feels confident in the water.
- Can do water steps(?) with arms and legs, can turn and orient themselves.
- Bath clothes
- Shirt/Crew neck with long sleeves
- Long pants, dress or skirt (reaches the ankle)
- Shoes (plastic/leather/sports)
Diploma A is the first of the three diplomas (ABC). If you have all of those you meet the national swimming safety standard.
More reading: https://www.allesoverzwemles.nl/nationale-zwemdiplomas/zwem-...
In addition to what I saw in the videos, it could be interesting to learn how to spot the drowning person because it went unconscious or because of a cramp, etc.
(Sometimes, new things pop up under a title that has been seen before)
HN regulars strongly prefer a year whenever it's not the current year, and the mods have confirmed that we should do so.
Finally I saw the child go down, so I wanted to rewind a few seconds to see what happened there. Nope, not allowed!
The site has an overlay where you can click on the drowning person and find out if you were correct. Hence the other controls are hidden.
Of course once they start swimming lessons, they practice without armbands.
In other words, if the small child supposedly needs armbands, they shouldn't be in the pool at all because the inflatables can easily slip off the arms.
Armbands are dangerous and hinder learning.
You can get a great used wet suits for next to nothing, and in many cases the swimming pools have life jacket loaners. A life jacket with safety straps (between legs) are super cheap, and they are adjustable for better fit. Snug fit means they're less in the way. And they're harder to remove.
If there wasn't a lifeguard the above obviously didn't apply.
Generally certain rides in water parks, like fast slides or streams will require you to have higher levels of swimming training to go on if you're under 14.
My parents were wise enough to enroll me in a course so I got my "early swimmer" (seahorse, Seepferdchen) training by age 6; that doesn't make you into a good swimmer yet, but at least you know the basics. Then elementary school took over and I got up to the gold diploma by age 10.
By age 8 or so I already was a far better swimmer than my parents, who never had any formal training.
I remember my mom once refusing to take one of my friends with us swimming when I was like 8 or 9 because he didn't have any swimming diplomas yet (he had only come to Germany from Tunisia like a year prior and was in the process of catching up with swimming ed). I remember I was mad at the time, but in hindsight it was absolutely the right decision.
Still, we all knew stories of kids relatively close to us drowning; for me it was the little brother of a friend of my sisters who drowned when he went to a water park as part of a kids birthday. The "usual" had happened: the two parents of the birthday kid being too overwhelmed by 10 or so loud kids amped up on candy and not trained lifeguards anyway, not enough lifeguards, wave pool... the adults didn't even notice they had lost track of this one kid until they saw the lifeguard pulling him out of the water, too late, or so the story went.
[1] https://www.dlrg.de/informieren/ausbildung/schwimmabzeichen [German]