Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning (2013)

slate.com

If you want to try yourself if you can identify drowning, there's this great educational 'game':

It's pretty hard to spot it before your hear the lifeguard blowing their whistle. Turns out [1] that the game was actually inspired by a HN thread on the same article in 2015 [2].

[1] https://github.com/FrankSalad/spot-the-drowning-child

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947237

I was a lifeguard and I never felt very confident in it tbh. But I do win this "game" every time. So... idk, what that says.

Sounds like a good mentality for a lifeguard I think, probably keeps you alert. And combined with the fact that you are good at spotting drowning people means that you really are a good fit for the job.

I think that's the only way I could do this job, if I was pretty much constantly terrified I might miss something, never comfortable, not at all. That has to be a hard state of mind to maintain when you might go a fairly long time in between crisis.

Watching these videos make me extremely emotional :( I had no idea that's how drowning looks,

I am also scared of water, so I guess (?) I am safe on that..

IMO, it's important to take swimming classes. You never know when it'll come in handy and there are bodies of water everywhere.

I agree, if there is a life skill you need to have, it would be knowing how to swim.

I also think in terms of effort vs. reward, swimming is a tremendously worthwhile skill to learn. You can become reasonably competent at swimming in 40 hours. Compare that to learning a language, which can take 1000s of hours.

40 hours of flashcards and practice can cover maybe 90% of your typical tourist conversations for many languages. Where are you from? What is your name? What do you do? How much does it cost? Can you give me a discount?

I can swim reasonably well and I'm not particularly scared of water. They still made me extremely emotional as well.

I'm the father of two small kids, and really had to force myself to watch a few of them just to get an idea to what to be on the lookout for.

Those inflatable tubes can't help a lifeguard's view of the pool.

No, but they help my gaming mindset. The majority of the issues arose when someone fell off of a tube in water too deep for them, so that's what I optimized for. I'd probably be a terrible life guard but I do just fine at the "game" version.

I'm pretty sure this is what most of the guards were watching for, too. Quite often they react instantly once someone goes under, so you know they had an eye on the kid climbing on top of their tube before that.

I used to be a lifeguard. I am glad I never had to deal with a pool like that with so many people and inner tubes in it. Makes line of sight so much more difficult.

When I was a lifeguard we forbade floats. They're lifeguard-resistant deathtraps.

Because of people getting trapped underneath?

Because you can't see underneath, a pool is 3D and if we can only see the surface we're missing the most dangerous part.

This is why jobs like lifeguard or airport security frequently rotate workers during a shift.

Respectfully, rotating shifts doesn't increase visibility under pool floats.

You’re right, I responded to the wrong comment.

I saw someone trying to help just get in the lifeguard's way in one of the vids - the pushed a huge gloat towards the kid but it was too high for him to reach. But they pushed it in the path of the lifeguard so it slowed down the rescue by a good 3 seconds.

It seems easy to spot once you see the first one, but it really just looks like a child bobbing up and down until then.

> http://spotthedrowningchild.com

Wow, even knowing there would be someone in danger, I didn't spot until, at best, the lifeguard jumped in and usually a little after that. And they didn't know something bad was about to happen, and had to be scanning the entire pool constantly. I should have had a few seconds of advantage on that at least.

I think I would be terrified to have a job like that... 99.99% of the time everything is fine, which would make it hard to maintain constant vigilance when you might go multiple days without an incident. while needing to be prepared for that extremely small window of crisis.

After you watch enough videos, you learn to look for kids doing unsafe things (e.g. climbing on flotation devices) to spot things ahead of time. Sure, you learn what drowning looks like, but if you watch, the lifeguards often react instantly which means they predicted that person would get themselves in trouble ahead of time and reacted as soon as the person went under.

I got a lot better at it after a little bit of practice and most of the improvement was figuring out who was doing dangerous things that you needed to keep an eye on.

I worked as a lifeguard for a few summers in high school and college, mostly as a supervisor in the latter years.

You're trained to develop a scanning pattern, and to not overly fixate on potential problem cases. Otherwise your tunnel vision might cause to miss something important that you hadn't noticed beforehand. I found that I got a pretty good intuition for things not looking "right".

When I had my 3rd child, the hospital made us watch about 2 hours of different videos about dealing with a < 1yr old child. I found this particularly interesting because:

1) It made perfect sense. You have to demonstrate a certain level of competence to get a driver's license, why not a child also?

2) For child #1 & #2 they just let us take them out of the hospital, which really felt surreal. Sort of like "Don't they know we have no idea what we're doing?"

Anyway, the point of that is to say that it probably makes sense to include something about swimming into those videos. Or to have the equivalent of annual "professional development" training for parents to educate them on the issues facing them in the next year of their kid's development.

Not required, that would be difficult to accomplish. But strongly encouraged & nudged repeatedly. Heck I can't go a year at my job without annual computer security educational programs to refresh staff on safe computing protocols, but parents are left flying blind to piece things together based on their own experiences growing up & whatever they've absorbed from pop media.

Oh my gosh. I wish someone would have prepared me for all of the screaming. So. Much. Screaming.

Put that in your annual training.

I just watched more from the video series posted above, and found one that illustrates this perfectly. I watched it multiple times: The lifeguard seemed loosely focused on the person the entire time, even when the person (to my eyes) looked fine, and when the person finally began going under the lifeguard jumped on the situation.

What is truly remarkable & indicative of the panic response is the fact that person was about 2ft from the ledge. In a rational state of mind they would know that from a few seconds earlier when they were safely in the tube. But that knowledge went completely out the window when their panic response kicked in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nANNAtq8Bpw

It goes even beyond a panic response. When drowning, a person cannot consciously control their arms. Nor yell for help. Basic inate responses take over. So even if they know exactlt what to do, they couldn't help themselves. The reading on the page is a great source of info.

That said, a number of those videos I don't know if they were full on drowning response, vs being in distress.

Thank you for this. I am a lifelong swimmer but never a lifeguard. Took me a couple tries to get an idea what to look for and then I could reliably pick up on the cues. However, that's with someone staring at the video closely; I can only imagine trying to keep up a scan through a long hot day in the sun with hundreds of people swimming.

I only watched 1, but I saw them immediately and it was confirmed when the lifeguard blew the whistle and made their way to them.

I think I have an advantage, though. I remember almost drowning as a kid. I wasn't at the top of the water like this person, though. I was at the bottom of the pool, desperately putting my hand up and hoping someone would see me. Interestingly, that's apparently really hard to do by what the text below the video says.

I thought my hand was still under the water, and I was laboriously making my way to where I thought the side of the pool was. Eventually, someone (at the time I thought it was my dad, but it wasn't!) grabbed my arm and pulled me out.

I didn't swallow any water and I wasn't harmed, but it really scared me.

I begged my parents for swimming lessons, but we lived in a small town, the lessons were too far away, and we couldn't afford them.

I ended up teaching myself to swim so that it would never happen to me again. I can save myself now, but my wife freaks out when I swim because I'm still really, really bad at it.

I still don't go in the ocean, and very rarely go in a pool, and never near anyone who I think might be an asshole and try to dunk me, even jokingly.

> I think I would be terrified to have a job like that... 99.99% of the time everything is fine, which would make it hard to maintain constant vigilance when you might go multiple days without an incident. while needing to be prepared for that extremely small window of crisis.

You just described the current state of “self driving” cars.

This one is particularly interesting in revealing the situational awareness of the lifeguards [0]. One jumps in from the left, then another when it looks like there could be more than one person that needs help.

At the same time, the two other lifeguards on duty on the right side reposition themselves: one stays on the right, the other moves to the left side of the pool, and both begin stalking up & down the pool length to monitor the pool as their colleagues deal with their situation.

It has the feel of a well-oiled machine to continue keeping the other swimmers safe even when overall monitoring capacity is reduced. A very good example of the need for-- and effective use of-- multiple redundancy layers in the realm of human safety.

I feel compelled to keep watching these at random until I can pick out the person in crisis by the time the lifeguard jumps in. After reading the article I am terrified of not being vigilant enough when my kids go swimming.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdu3Kq8bmxc

When I was in the army, one of my roommates drowned right in front of a bunch of people he was swimming with. He was in about 3 meters of water, got a leg cramp, went under, and never came back up. I found him face down on the bottom of the lake with his face in the mud. He was later declared dead. Took a while to get over that.

I'm a very amateur swimmer and I try to understand why people drown from cramp in one leg? Because me being a novice, I learned how to swim without using the legs too much (mainly because it takes skill to coordinate everything well) and one of the very first things was me floating by turning my head hard backwards while standing vertically in the water and sinking in water up to the nose, basically sticking as little of my face above water as possible and IIRC I was floating fine with very little help from hands and no use of the feet at all. That seemed easy, especially in dense cold water..

My lifeguard mother almost drowned from a leg cramp (see my sibling comment), she explained that the pain of movement becomes so unbearable that your body basically goes into the fetal position and sinks to the bottom.

I occasionally wake up from extreme leg cramps. It literally feels like someone is taking a knife on the serrated edge and pulling it down from the top of your calf muscle for a solid 20 seconds. All you can do is writhe in agony and scrounge up into a ball because naturally that is your response. After it's over you're in a ton of fatigue, your heart is racing, and just want to rest. Now do that in a pool.

Ok, I understand.. it seems I had milder versions of cramps. The one I remember the most was when I basically had to grab the toes of my foot and pull hard counter to the cramping muscle and basically it ceased after several seconds. It was very painful but I didn't know they can be paralyzing.

This kind of extreme cramp is known as a "charley horse", if you want more information.

Used to get that a lot. Leg once cramped super hard which smashed my knee into a metal railing. Double agony that night.

  Magnesium supplements really helped a lot. Later on, stretching lots and lots of stretching.  Now a massage gun.  Cramps are a thing of the past.

I get those in bed from time to time and my course of action is to keep the leg strait during the onset, get out of bed and stand up stretching the leg muscle. The pain can be very intense but once I stand up and apply pressure by standing on the leg, it almost immediately stops the cramp and the pain subsides within a few seconds.

I used to let the leg contract and curl up powering through the cramp pain until it subsided but a few times it lasted over a minute which is agonizing.

Sometimes I get leg cramps in bed and I've found that I have to pull my toes upward to make it recover. Doing that seems to release whatever is cramping up for me after a few seconds.

I used to have to get out of bed and stand on it before I discovered the other trick.

Same here, have also tried that in the water, but didn't work that time. I get the feeling that some of the cramps people talk about here are worse though, or perhaps it's also about how much pain you can stand or how you react to such a situation in general.

Yeah, I don't think mine have ever felt like a serrated blade going through my leg, as another comment here mentioned, so probably not quite as bad. But it's definitely bad enough that I can't use the leg properly and it seems to manifest when I move my leg just wrong somehow, even in bed.

The trick to pull the tip of my foot backwards really helped a lot because then I don't have to try to stand or anything.

I've never had a cramp like that in water, thankfully.

As a young adult, I had the same problem once or twice per week. There are many potential causes, but I was lucky to find the cause of mine on the first try (after suffering with them for a few years). Now I take a daily potassium supplement. (One 550mg tablet of potassium gluconate daily.) I haven't had a leg cramp for decades.

Aye! That's it usually- electrolytes.

Lack of hydration has also caused me light cramps. E.g: I was too excited about learning to surf to want go out of the water one summer. Plain water did the trick for me there.

You could try using a salt substitute like nusalt or lite salt. They contain potassium chloride. Cheap easy way to remember to get potassium, just eat.

it doesn't take much movement to get a cramp. the few times that i had a cramp, i was doing things like getting out of bed or standing up from a chair. horribly painful and the only thing you can do is to stop moving and try to relax.

if you do that in the water, you sink. by the time you realize that this was a bad idea it's to late. i can imagine that the pain would distract me to much to be able to focus and use my arms to keep me afloat. never mind that i'd probably also not think about taking a deep breath to get enough air before sinking.

Hm, maybe that's why - see my other comment, I 've had a few cramps while swimming and I've handled them without help, but I get those cramps out of the water also (especially when I stretch my legs during sleep) and I can actually feel them coming and I know what to do: the cramping muscle fights to pull the leg one way, I fight to extend it the other way. Eventually, I win, although it hurts like hell. Obviously I roll about in the water when I do that, but I don't have to sink, I can use my other leg and arms to float.

Anyway maybe that's something that can be trained?

(btw, this is not a humblebrag. I'm dumb enough that I almost drowned at least once and it was 100% just being dumb. Just nothing to do with cramps.)

Edit: I realised you can feel cramps coming by speaking with a friend who's a bodybuilder. He related a story where he felt a cramp coming in the middle of a set of squats and thankfully recognised it in time to place the bar on the hooks. When I first started having cramps I paid attention and you can actually feel the muscle tensing up so there's time to react to it, although I don't know how you can avoid the tearing pain. I only know to try and unlock the muscle by pushing the other way and massaging it.

Edit 2: Oh, er. There's menstrual cramps of course. I'm lucky not to get those. I don't think you can "push the other way" with them. Ugh.

My mother was a lifeguard and was swimming in a medium-sized empty pool surrounded by other lifeguards (her colleagues). Her leg cramped badly and she went under, she said the pain of trying to move was unbearable. She crumpled up at the bottom of the pool and nearly drowned before her one of her fellow lifeguards noticed something was wrong and saved her.

That story's always stuck in my head.

That is the most personally terrifying thing I’ve ever read. I’m a strong swimmer, and have never been afraid for myself in still water. Hopefully, if I ever get a leg cramp, your story will make me realize the danger and quickly scream for help before going under.

I occasionally have leg cramps while swimming- I never felt I was in danger though. Is it really that dangerous? I'm talking about painful cramps where I really can't use the leg that's cramping before a few minutes go by. Generally what I do is swear the air purple (it really bloody hurts) and try to keep the cramping leg extended (it's normally the muscle in the back of my tibia that cramps and it wants to draw my heel back, so I push the other way until it gives up). I thrash a lot and go under the water for sure, but I can still swimm with the remaining limbs. I don't know what I'd do if both legs cramped at the same time, but one leg so far I've been able to handle.

Edit: now that I think of it, I've had both legs cramp, except not at the same time- a few minutes apart. I was getting used to very long flippers (fins?) and I got two cramps a few minutes apart, one in each leg.

It may have been both legs in that story. I know another time, she was swimming next to a canoe and they started cramping, and so she had to grab on. In that case, the leg cramp(s?) were less severe, luckily.

Yea, if it's both legs- or the abdomen...

Have also made it back ashore when swimming by myself in the see after getting a pretty bad cramp in one of my calves. Lots of swearing as well, went into floating position on my back and tried to stretch it out to no avail. Finally just kind of half floated half swam back over what felt like 10 minutes or so until I could call out to a friend. Have stayed a bit closer to people after that

I almost drowned in college, during swim class, due to cramping. A fellow student pulled me up. The instructor never got in the water.

This topic has come up on HN several times before and it never ceases to unsettle me. I'd never had a personal experience with it before. It's even more chilling after having had an experience with it.

My 8 y/o daughter recently attended a "pool party" w/ sports teammates. One of the mothers, fully clothed and there only acting as a chaperon, jumped in to pull out one of the girls who was in distress.

The distressed girl's mother had commented, just a few moments before, on how the girl was "fine" and "just playing" as she flailed about in the water. My wife said the girl didn't look to be in distress, per se, but was kind of "jumping around".

I found out later that the mother who rescued the girl she'd been a lifeguard. She recognized the girl was in distress. There were 8 to 10 other adults present and no one else, in or out of the pool, was thinking too much of it. It's absolutely chilling.

The problem is that drowning looks exactly like someone just "jumping" in place in the pool. If you don't know what to look for, you might not realize what's going on, but for anyone who knows, it should rightfully set off alarm bells.

I hope someone sends the parent this game so they can learn without having a dead kid :(

This article actually "saved my life". I read it back then in 2013 and in 2014 I almost drowned.

Just before I felt that something was very wrong I remembered that this post said that if you drown it is already too late to scream for help. So I shout to my friend, who was also with me in the water, that I am about to drown. He then tried to help me but then he struggled too because of the current and the strong waves which came out of nowhere. It took us a lot of effort to get back to a point where we were able to stand. Until today I try to avoid to go deeper than I can actually stand.

For your last sentence, do you mean "to this day"? "Until today" means something that ended/stopped today. Or are you a good enough swimmer now that you feel comfortable swimming in deep water?

Yes, to this day.

Thanks! :)

One thing I learned in naval aviator swim qual was how easy it is to float for a very long time, given the right technique. (Called a dead man’s float. Link: https://www.sportsrec.com/prone-float-8623477.html )

We naturally try to swim with our heavy head out of the water, but with full lungs most people will easily float for almost an unlimited amount of time, only popping your head up for a breath. Somehow, the more nervous you are, the more you struggle to keep your head out of the water. Learning that I could float like this for hours if needed keeps me calm in the water, I recommend you all try it, and keep it in mind to fall back on if you ever start to panic in the water.

I grew up on lakes in Florida. I wasn't taught to "swim" as much as I was taught to survive in water.

Swim classes should be reframed as water survival classes IMHO.

You have to find the right swim classes. We started our children in swim classes at 2 years old, but I was never very satisfied with the instruction they were receiving. I could see them struggling with things and the instructors would just sort of give them nudges in the water to get them to go in the direction they wanted, but weren't really working on explaining things. They also made the kids sit on the side of the pool when it wasn't their turn, so 2/3rds of the 30 minutes they were there, they weren't in the water, getting comfortable with it, learning not to fear it.

When our youngest turned 3, they moved him up to a class where I no longer got in the pool with him, and he was not ready for that. I told them he wasn't ready and they didn't listen. Ultimately, he wasn't getting enough time in the water to get over his fear of getting his face wet, and the instructors were rushing him too much that he started hating going. So we took him out and I bought a 12' diameter, 20" deep pool for the back yard (oof, getting the ground leveled to set it up was quite an ordeal). He is still aprehensive when he first gets in, but usually after about 30 minutes he's asking me to put on goggles so he can stick his face in the water. He'll get there.

Our oldest is 5. His first swim classes were at a different place entirely, but we moved out of there and had to find a new place (the place I hate). So I think he got a better foundation of familiarity with the water to then be able to get something out of the classes at the later school. He swims like a fish now. He recently attended a pool party for a friend's birthday and swam non-stop for pretty much 2 hours.

The "large kiddie pool" or "small above ground pool" was a good balance of cost (I probably put $300 total into the pool, setting it up, and care equipment/chemicals) and capacity for what they need, which is really just "figuring out how their bodies work in water."

The school that I hate is called Goldfish. They're a national chain. Avoid them, if at all possible.

I have been told that only at 5 kids have the psychomotor development to actually _learn_ swimming. Until then it is 'dress rehearsal'...They are basically learning how to be in water, etc, with an adult paying attention

I'm not a good swimmer, but curiously I was never afraid to jump in the water. With some friends on the beach, I went out for a swim, until I had the feeling the sea was getting rougher and me getting tired. At some point, anxiety kicked in and the feeling I was loosing strength and not reaching the beach fast enough. I tried the position several times in the hope to rest a bit, but everytime I got so much water in the face that gave me the feeling to get waterboarded, I could only stay a few moments. Close to what felt as the end, I had the last strength to lift my shoulders out the water and call my friends, who saved me.

Yes, this. Physics works, but I needed to be taught it and forced to practice it before I believed it enough to rely on it.

Also floating on your back is a great way to rest and regroup. One thing that could be challenging with it is that if the waves are too choppy or with strong wind, it may be hard to keep the face esp. nose clear of water, which could add to panic. This position also needs some light kicks to keep legs from sinking. Restoring the breathing rhythm is what lets one get some control over the situation.

No matter the skill, we humans are still the land creatures. Let's stay safe!

On a swim safety note, if you're going to be swimming in open water, I highly recommend getting yourself a swim buoy for visibility. You can also use it to stash your phone, keys, etc if you've got a dry bag. https://outdoorswimmer.com/product-reviews/tow-floats-and-dr...

Thank you for sharing. I wasn't aware these existed and am already looking at getting one. As others in the discussion have noted, it doesn't a lot of depth or distance for bad things to happen.

They're handy to have. I think most of them are technically not life saving devices, but you can use them for a bit of extra flotation if you need them. They're handy to rest your head on if you're taking a break and hopefully they make you more visible to other traffic on the water. If you're swimming with buddies it helps them to see where you are at in the water, especially if you're farther apart or if the water isn't flat.

I'll sometimes swim with a group at sunrise. We swim out about 750m from shore. Having the buoys helps us see where the other swimmers are at and ensure that everyone is safe. Also, if the swimmers ahead of you have good lines and they're sighting on the same thing as you are, you can be a bit lazy and just follow their buoys instead of having to pick out a landmark on the horizon.

You can even put an LED inside of some of them to get a bit of extra visibility depending on conditions. Lots of options!

>We swim out about 750m from shore.

Yeesh, this for some reason invokes a likely unreasonable bit of fear in me. I completely understand sucking it up and getting over things if money is involved (like working on a crab boat in the Bering Sea), but that far out for leisure activity spooks me.

I was always a pretty good swimmer and had my lifeguard license for a bit as a teen through boyscouts activities. I've always been aware of risks of open water and riptides and how to deal with them... for as long as I can remember.

However, a few years back now at Blacks Beach in La Jolla (reputation of the best yet most dangerous surf in California AFAIK), in a normal beachspot I'd spent a lot of time around away from the surf, I mind bogglingly got hit by an outlier of a wave out of nowhere in otherwise calm waters, close to shore. I had prescription glasses on with no safety, stupid, but I'd had no plans of being in anything higher than my low waist, and only for a short while.

Glasses got knocked off (I'm really near sighted without + severe static vision), wave brought me down under to the sand, and I was pulled out by the most insane force. I'm a mechanical engineer, so well aware of the sheer insanity of the forces involved with bodies of water and currents, but it was just an unreal and out of nowhere rip.

Got myself quickly situated and calm but internally scared as all fuck, was pulled out probably 1.5 miles by the time I swam out of the rip. Swimming back in was hell because I was mostly physically exerted from hiking already.

Nobody noticed what had happened and there wasn't a damn thing anybody could've really done about it either.

Not too sure why I felt the need to write this out... but stay safe. I can only want to get my swimming done in a pool at this point, unless I'm around highly competent lifeguards with boats and rescue equipment (I'm sure there's a chance you are perhaps around boats when doing this?). Just so much that can go wrong so fast.

Oh, that sounds terrible. I'm glad your story has a happy ending.

I should have added that we swim on Lake Ontario and it's usually pretty flat, so no rogue waves or riptide. We don't have any support boats for this swim, but I do swim with a couple of other groups that have more safety measures. On Saturdays there's an excellent group nearby that has kayaks and SUPs to help make sure everyone is safe: https://lostswimming.com/ A couple of folks who come out to swim have crossed the English Channel and done all sorts of longer swims, so you can learn a lot from them. People keep tabs on each other and try to make sure nobody is swimming alone. If I'm being really slow, people wait for me to catch up.

Over here we have to watch out for jet skis, so that's one reason to swim at sunrise -- we get out before the boat traffic gets heavy. Another issue is water temperature. You have to recognize early signs of hypothermia so that you don't get caught out far from shore and find yourself in a bad way. Basically you need to head back to shore before your decision making gets impaired to the point that you're not going to make good choices. Or just know how long you can generally handle being in the water at certain temperatures. If it's too cold for me, I stick close to shore.

So, based on that, it's always good to swim with a buddy, get out if you're shivering, etc.

I totally understand sticking to the pool. I had a mechanical problem on my road bike last summer and it ejected me (softly) onto someone's front lawn out in the country. It could have been much worse if I had hit asphalt or another rider. It took me almost a year before I got back onto a road bike that wasn't in my garage.

I've seen this as an LPT or similar posted on Reddit. I think it helped save a life in the New Year pre-pandemic.

I'd stopped at a picnic location near a rocky Atlantic (European) coastline with my partner. It was a picturesque location but the sea was inhospitable - huge swell and waves that just looked violent. We'd sat down at a bench with a view of the sea and set out our lunch. At some point after that I noticed two people in the sea, maybe 30-50m out. They were bobbing about in the swell. Initially I was confused. It didn't look right but my mind tried to make explanations - maybe the locals just swim out there in crazy conditions? After some time it became clear that they were in trouble, I guess that's when the "drowning doesn't look like drowning" advice came to me. Luckily the beach (tiny strip of sand between cliffs) had a well-labelled sign with an emergency number that I called and managed to ask for an English speaker and described the situation.

Whilst waiting for the response one of the people in the water started trying to tow the other towards shore but made no progress. They kept disappearing behind large waves and at some point I could only pick out one of them, then I saw a pair of shoes or sandals floating then I saw the other person face down in the water, occasionally visible behind the swell. There was some dithering where a local official came to the beach to check out the report but eventually we heard helicopters and one person was rescued and the body of the other recovered.

It turned out there was a group of three tourists, two sons (teenage/early 20s) and their dad. A local had taken them to a fishing spot - a flat rock that spanned out towards the sea close to water level. A large wave had washed the dad and one of his sons out to sea. The dad died. I witnessed the other son - who hadn't been washed out to sea - being interviewed by police, as utterly distraught as i've ever seen a person, understandably.

Looking back on it I should have realised the severity of the situation sooner but perhaps without this advice I would have left it too late and neither would have made it.

As someone who recently almost drowned a couple weeks ago this article is spookily accurate. I was surprised how indifferent everyone on the shore was when a wave finally coughed me up onto the sand. My only assumption, post stress headache, was that it just didn’t look like I was drowning.

What was the cause of duress? Undertow? Fatigue? Inexperienced swimmer?

I suspect it was a mix of a couple things. Here’s how it went: 1. I exhausted myself to a fair degree when I first swam out in order to get past the point at which the waves were breaking. Once I was in a calm area I began to rest and catch my breath. 2. I began to feel what I can only describe as a slight panic attack when I noticed that the current was behaving slightly like a rip (a current pushing away from the shore). 3. The cold temp of the water mixed with the newfound anxiety and my exhaustion began to make me feel shorter and shorter of breath. 4. At this point I was in full panic mode and started using all of my energy to get back to the shore or at least to the point at which the waves were breaking to carry me in.

So I think in general you could categorize it as an inexperienced swimmer because I couldn’t spot the rip from the shore but I don’t think its always so obvious since even a small one could carry you away.

Yeah, never fight the rip tide, you won't win. Move laterally - rip currents are usually narrow, and you can swim out of them sideways. The lack of control, though, is freaky and unsettling.

Something else that is important to mention is that young kids can easily slip into a pool or jacuzzi and not make a sound. We might think we would hear a "splash!", but that isn't necessarily true.

I watched my daughter step of the ledge in a jacuzzi once and it was completely silent. One second she was walking and the next she was under water.

Keep your eyes on young children near water at all times. If they are really young and can't yet swim, either be with them or have them wear an approved flotation device. Going under can happen in a split second when your back is turned.

So, at the risk of doing the SV "how can we ML this" thing, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to apply computer vision. I'm sure OpenAI or Deepmind or whoever could build a lot of good will by training such a model and freely distributing it.

I'm sure it will be tricky due to lack of training data, though.

You could maybe even do this without an end-to-end ML system, and just use ML to do the head+arms detection, and then do a rules-based approach to determine the drowning status. This is probably much more tractable and doesn't have the lack of training data.

Strongly agreed in theory, but…

That goodwill ends when the company is found to be uploading all footage to the cloud to evaluate everyone’s physical fitness and body shape for future insurance company use, and to build a picture of your social web for Facebook one day, and heck, whatever else people will pay to know, including to serve warrants against other people incorrectly identified by other ml systems as commuting some crime

I’ll become 100x more pro-machine vision once severe laws get made to restrict how it’s used.

Yes we can - and what people miss, you don't have to be ML only or Human only - it can be Human lifeguard augmented by ML, especially at places like beaches where the horizon to scan is much larger. I suppose the danger is of the human becoming complacent.

As far as training data, if we know what it looks like, we can create virtual scenes that simulate different conditions and scenarios and train on that. Obviously, it won't be perfect but if it gets deployed, we can start getting more real life data and augment the training on that.

Not for lifeguards, but I've always imagined a future vision system that would track me in my lap swim workout. At the end, it would tell me my stats, length swam, times, stroke done (with count) and maybe even down the line coaching my form.

you don't have to be ML only - it can be Human lifeguard augmented by ML

Yep, when it comes to such things my background leans towards NLP. Not sure what the OCR state of the art is these days, but it used to be side-by-side human-assisted computer: The computer did the bulk of the work. For language translation (at least in lower stakes applications) it was the reverse: A human assisted by a computer. Even within computer-only NLP methods, they often benefited from a mixed-model approach using both rule-based & stochastic methods together.

There is apparently a company doing this already:

https://swimeye.com/

My concern is that it could give lifeguards a false sense of security, make them complacent unless they get an alarm. A fair amount of research has been done on that sort of thing, for example commercial airlines when autopilots started to become more sophisticated: It took a while and a lot of training of pilots to avoid a false sense of security.

It's kind of disappointing that this looks for people drowning at the bottom of the pool. That's a much later intervention than spotting the problem while they're still struggling at the surface. Maybe that problem space was much harder to solve?

We had our 9mo child take 'Infant Swim Rescue' courses, basically anti-drowning lessons. The concern being the waters near us are cloudy and it'd be impossible to see someone if they went under. Classes went well.

At a neighbors party a 2.5yo fell into the pool. I saw it happening and the little girl just SANK LIKE A STONE. With a panicked look on her face. Little feet hit the bottom, let out a blurp of air and did nothing. Her Dad was already in the air diving into the water before I could get up. The child was fine, thankfully. Her folks immediately asked about the classes I'd mentioned before.

I can still see the complete bewilderment on that child's face. She just had NO IDEA what to do and would have drowned had it not been for quick actions.

My point here is lessons are absolutely worth considering starting MUCH earlier than you might guess. This isn't learning to 'swim', it's learning how 'not to drown'.

We had our 9mo child take 'Infant Swim Rescue' courses, basically anti-drowning lessons

Can you expand on what that included? Was it focused on parents identifying children in distress, or did it in some way help train kids on what to do if in distress?

They teach the kids to seek out the edge of the pool, to try to turn towards the edge and grab it if they fall off the edge, and to try to get at least an elbow up on the edge of the pool. I suspect a lot of it is a preamble to learning to swim at a later age. By exposing the children to water at a very early age, they learn to accept it without a lot of fear. It preconditions them so they are more successful at actual swim classes when they're a little older.

We have two kids. I kick myself for not getting our youngest (3) started earlier. He didn't start classes until he was about 20 months. We all had a lot of health problems after he was born (all unrelated!), so his first year was a bit of a rollercoaster. Our oldest (5), we started at about 10 months, then had about a year and a half long break before starting him again. There's a stark difference in their comfort level in the water, even comparing how the 5-yr-old acted when he was 3, versus how his younger brother acts now. Yet they are the complete opposite regarding risk-taking behavior on dry ground.

The AAP says: "infants younger than 1 year are developmentally unable to learn the complex movements, such as breathing, necessary to swim. They may manifest reflexive swimming movement under the water but cannot effectively raise their heads to breathe. There is no evidence to suggest that infant swimming programs for those younger than 1 year are beneficial."

The evidence for swimming lessons before 1 year is discussed in this article: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/summer-is-here-and-infant-s...

My niece has had swim lessons since she was 6 months old IIRC and she is an awesome swimmer now at 3 years old.

That doesn't necessarily indicate whether or not she's a better swimmer than she would be if she'd started later than 6 months old, though - maybe the first months were entirely pointless or maybe they're why she's so great already at 3.

Article seems to be spot on - it's good to remind people about it once in a while.

When I was a kid I jumped into a semi-empty pool, where depth was more or less equal to my total height. Bad judgment on my part. I couldn't swim so all I could do was bouncing of the bottom, gasping for air with each bounce. That was the only thing I could think of doing. Lifeguard was there but he didn't notice drowning kid, nor did people around me in the pool. Fortunately my father was more aware, and jumped in, fully clothed, to drag me out. I don't remember if it lasted 30 seconds or 2 minutes but I do remember the scared face of the 'lifeguard' when we were walking past him.

edit:grammar, at least what I've noticed

I lifeguarded throughout my teens. Definitely a good first job. However, almost 20 years on, I have difficulty turning off my sense of vigilance at pools/bodies of water. It’s not that I can’t enjoy pools or swimming, but you’ll see me scanning and silently counting heads, secretly sorting other swimmers by swim level, and quietly scooting over closer to where the kids are maybe getting a little too deep for their own good.

The author of this has some videos related to swimming (0). See for example the one called "1-10-1 Final" where he jumps into cold water that is about 40 degrees F (4 degrees C) and stays in for a number of minutes, showing what to do.

[0] https://vimeo.com/mariovittone

I continue to be amazed by what lifeguards can do.

Even if drowning looked like drowning there is just so much going on in a crowded pool I cannot imagine how people can pick on anything. To me it seems like an audio-visual version of drinking from a firehose.

If I was in their place the best strategy that I could conceive of adopting would be to a for loop checking each one out, and perhaps dwelling a little longer on those who I think maybe particularly susceptible. But this would be a terrible strategy, too easy to miss someone, too much latency in revisit time.

So a hat tip to all lifeguards on HN, deeply appreciate your work.

> Even if drowning looked like drowning there is just so much going on in a crowded pool I cannot imagine how people can pick on anything. To me it seems like an audio-visual version of drinking from a firehose.

Watch for the kid playing on their float or doing other dangerous things, I'm convinced it's what most of the lifeguards are doing.

As a pre-teen who frequently went to the beach alone to bodysurf, I was once rescued from a riptide by an alert lifeguard. I was in a group of strangers who were all taller than me. The waves were pounding me relentlessly and I was in distress, but the group was oblivious. Fortunately the lifeguard was paying attention and came to my aid.

From 2013, but still highly relevant and something all adults should be aware of.

this type of training should accompany CPR training, something all adults should know also.

The last time I took CPR certification the instructor said it shouldn't be taught anymore because it is essentially useless in day-to-day life. The speed at which the brain dies without immediate hospital attention is just too rapid for CPR to be effective outside of a hospital.

EDIT: I'm not lying, I was literally told this by the person performing the certifications. She said only 1 in 20 people survive without severe brain damage. Which is better than death to some people I guess.

According to the American Heart Association [0], CPR can double or triple the chances of survival:

"Each year nationwide, more than 350,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest outside of a hospital; only about 10 percent survive.

When the heart stops beating, a lack of oxygenated blood can cause death within minutes. If CPR is performed immediately, it can keep blood flowing to the brain and other vital organs, doubling or tripling a person’s chance of survival."

[0] https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/08/22/cpr-training-at-sch...

Not to mention that AED's are more prevalent in public spaces these days. If you can provide CPR _and_ use the AED the chances of survival increase dramatically.

Counter example: Danish captain at the Euro 2020 opening game.

I think this proves the point -- Simon Kjaer was hailed a hero for 'life-saving' response to Christian Eriksen's collapse [0] and Eriksen was discharged from the hospital 6 days later (he had a defibrillator implanted). Had no-one done CPR he may well have died.

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/euro-2020-denmark-captain-simon-k...

That sounds like nonsense and it's certainly not what I've been taught when I've taken advanced first aid courses. It's true that the statistics are not on your side in that the CPR has only a 1 in 5 chance of being successful and that is if you start immediately after the persons heart stops, but that's no reason not to try it.

Recently, an acquaintance of mine was saved by two of his employees who performed CPR on him for 30 mins until the ambulance arrived. He was very lucky to have collapsed in front of them and that they had both been in the army and had good first aid medical. He was hospitalised for 3 weeks and he has memory problems now, but he's out of bed and there for his kids.

Humans should do what humans are good at and come up with technological solutions to this. Maybe a small waistband flotation device that inflates via a CO2 cartridge once your fitbit recognizes that you're not breathing normally, giving you enough buoyancy to stop panicking and get to shore?

Also: stay away from low head dams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYgODmmiAM

After watching the videos around the time this article came out, I spotted a man drowning in the ocean. I was on a cliff looking down at some tourists not familiar with the ocean. I couldn't get down to him or make myself heard to shout a warning. Fortunately, he pulled out of it and got to shore. It was the most helpless I ever felt.

(2010)! (it's a republish)

Some previous discussions of this old piece resubmitted often by usual suspects:

11 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492835

6 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947237

5 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667755

3 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170593

resubmitted often by usual suspects

Do you mean you think they were posting/reposting things purely for upvotes? If so, I still don't care: As something both interesting & important, popping up on the front page seems like a good thing every few years. I don't care if @tomte or whoever is doing it just to get meaningless internet points. Different people rotate in & out of HN, so anything really interetsing/important is just fine by me if it keeps popping up.

Honestly, this is a useful thing that should be republished at the start of every summer when people start to go swimming again.

If it ends up on the front page every time, it means that people are interested in it. Guidelines say it’s ok to repost every other year.

I was snorkeling Sunday, it was a beautiful morning with clear sky, I come back to beach after around 20 minutes in water to a shocking scene that a few life guards are doing CPR on a unresponsive man(or maybe an teenager); That water is packed with people, and it is not deep, only around waist of an adult at where people snorkeling; but this still happened, and I didn't even notice it while I was in the water ...

I almost drowned this way when I was a child. Parents were less than a meter away, thought I was 'playing', since I was right next to the stairs.

It's chilling that this response is still fairly specialist knowledge. I would be dead if it wasn't for a random woman walking by who happened to know about it at the right second.

It's incredible how much text there's about it and zarroh video material. So difficult to hire an actor and show us dummies how drowning does look like? There's enough CPR videos, thanks a lot for them, yet about drowning just blah and confusing animations. </angryrant>

Here's another comment with some excellent demonstration video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984716

Look at the post further up were a poster pointed to http://spotthedrowningchild.com/ which uses videos.

I'm missing the explanatory, clear, close-up videos. The gamea with a pixel-wide kid somewhere in the background would then work to check on that learning.

The game is very good to train yourself even without knowing ahead of time what you're watching for. That said, there's a relatively close up video here and it actually takes the lifeguard a while to react:

https://www.webmd.com/parenting/video/can-you-spot-drowning

Refresh a few times, it seems to present examples randomly, and some are much more close up than pixel-wide.

Regardless, consider the job of the lifeguard: They don't have the benefit of clear close-up sight of all swimmers. If you can't spot the drowner when you know there will be one, imagine how much more difficult it is for a lifeguard who doesn't know when a crisis will occur.

Unless you're willing to go to lifeguard school, learn to train yourself on the hard-to-spot examples without explanatory details: you'll be a lot more likely to gain a potentially life-saving skill.

This is great, just shared it with my partner. Definitely eye opening to the danger. I wonder if there'd be some value in an automated throwable PFD launcher as an early response -- launch a pfd out over the top of the probable victim, and slowly tow it in to a shallow ramp.

Wow. This is the kind of information that really should be spread more. The article, and the spotting game! In fact, if there were a fundraiser to promote the game, I would be willing to donate $20. It feels like this could make a difference if more people knew about it.

There's a video out there of three Indian guys who filmed themselves drowning when they went swimming in a pool of water. Most people seem to think it looks fake/staged. I won't bother linking to it, but I'm sure google can turn it up if you go looking.

Similar to how life-threatening depression often doesn't look like life-threatening depression

Drowning does look like drowning. Drowning might not look like what you think drowning looks like.

I imagine you're kidding, but that's literally the point of the title. Of course X looks like X, but there are different contextual implications for what "drowning" refers to here. The fact the title takes the form "X doesn't look like X" obviously implies it's discussion two different contextual X's.

Drowning is the worst way to die. Think of it as waterboarding.

I wonder if the same applies to companies, departments or marriages?

> And parents—children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

That’s some really sound advice.

What an odd title. Drowning does look like drowning. How could it be any other way, given that it's involuntary?

It's pretty clear from the article that it means drowning IRL doesn't look like how drowning is portrayed in most media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com