http://spotthedrowningchild.com
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].
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.
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.
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".
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.
Put that in your annual training.
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:
That said, a number of those videos I don't know if they were full on drowning response, vs being in distress.
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.
You just described the current state of “self driving” cars.
I am also scared of water, so I guess (?) I am safe on that..
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.
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.