The cruel Thames: the job of pulling bodies from a dark, dangerous river | Hacker News Reader

The cruel Thames: the job of pulling bodies from a dark, dangerous river

theguardian.com

58 pointsannabyrd44 comments

The river police and the transport police have a pretty traumatic job in London. But the RNLI, also mentioned in the article, is the maritime search and rescue service for the UK. It’s completely funded by charitable donations and most of the crew are unpaid volunteers; anyone can volunteer. Edit, submitted before finished: At many other towns and cities around the UK which don’t have specialist police units like this and where there are also suicide hotspots the job of body recovery falls to these volunteers.

> the RNLI, also mentioned in the article, is the maritime search and rescue service for the UK

HM Coastguard.

HM Coastguard and the RNLI do different roles though - the former is more about co-ordination amongst different rescue agencies and the RNLI runs lifeboats.

mm. The loss of the RNLI would leave a major hole. More details for anyone who is interested: https://hmcoastguard.uk/news/whos-who-search-and-rescue-your...

But i still maintain HMCG best fits the description "the maritime search and rescue service for the UK". I mean, if you call RNLI with an emergency they'll tell you to hang up and dial 999.

I suppose being the UK there would never be easy answers to questions like that....

Yes technically true. HMCG are recognised in international law as responsible for maritime search and rescue operations in UK territorial waters. Practically speaking in most cases if you have a problem in UK (and Irish) waters the RNLI is probably going to search for and rescue you, if it’s really bad you’ll get a helicopter dispatched as well from Bristow helicopters who are subcontracted to HMCG but I think there’s only about 6 choppers covering the whole of the UK.

RNLI standards for crewing and training are very high, and their equipment is top-notch. They have years'-long waiting lists for applicants. (That's at least true in the regions in the South with which I'm familiar. Not sure about elsewhere in the country.) They're an incredible organization that I think should receive more attention than they do.

Source: sailed a bit along the Solent, and got to know some RNLI crew and hopefuls. Have been aboard RNLI rescue craft, and was fortunate enough to ride along on a demonstration runs.

> Once someone is reported to be in the water, invariably they must wait for the body to pop up.

Not quite invariably. The river police do rescue people who find themselves in the Thames. A couple of years ago I was walking between Southwark Bridge and Cannon Street Railway Bridge in the early evening when I noticed a group of people pointing towards something bobbing up and down in the middle of the river, in very turbulent conditions. It was someone who had fallen in. The river police arrived less than a minute or so later to rescue him. We walked down to the Bankside riverboat stop where the police dropped him off, conscious, and there was a waiting ambulance. I remember overhearing the police saying he had no idea how he fell in. I’d guess he was very lucky indeed and owed his life to the swift response of the police and whoever reported it.

Slipped and fell into water in town. Cannot remember what happened. Struggling to swim. There is an old joke about most drowning victims being found with their fly undone. Alcohol near water is never a good idea.

Very likely. Took place at around 8pm so post work drinks that got out of hand.

Most paths along the Thames have no walls or fences, it's straight into the water.

There are also bridges with very low side walls. It's not too difficult to imagine someone losing their footing or tripping and going "overboard", especially at night on the way home from the pub...

Water is much trickier than many people realize. I live on the Delaware River, near where Washington made his famous crossing. The river here is very shallow and looks deceptively peaceful.

Yet people die on this stretch every year, even experienced kayakers who let their guard down. What generally happens is someone falls out of their kayak / tube / whatever, and their feet get caught in a snag in the bottom. The river current is enough to force them under water.

Most places around here will no longer rent water equipment if the river is running high and fast, yet some foolish people manage to go out and die.

But not sure what the answer is for people falling in from the banks or bridges. Comprehensive fencing is expensive and ugly.

I live next to Baltimore and somewhat frequently you hear about a body fished out of the Inner Harbor. Just like in The Wire. Though I’m sure every city on a body of water experiences the same thing.

Love that season of the Wire. I'm from rural Ireland and there is a body of water near my home that is a suicide hotspot - 2 towns on the same river have given their share of young men to it unfortunately.

There is a rather prevalent belief, perhaps even a subconscious one, among people that suicide by leaping into a body of water is the go-to method. Probably doesn't help that it's been shown in media a lot, probably only below hanging and, perhaps, wrist-slitting. Anecdotally, at least 5 or 6 people that I've spoken to when discussing some grim news regarding events like these had the impression that suicide by water was a fast and calm process, which it most certainly is not. I still think about Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit and his tragic demise, that one was very publicised and I can only hope it didn't inspire too many other struggling people.

I'm a member of a maritime SAR unit and when rescued, people who have deliberately entered the water often say they didn't want to be found by their family or found at all.

That is tragic, I didn’t even know about that aspect but it, sadly, makes sense within a suicidal person’s logic.

Many cases also involve leaping from a tall bridge which raises the odds somewhat of a fast and painless death.

My anecdotal experience of such events is two fold... One time I actually considered doing this but when it came to it I realised that, no matter how hopeless my situation seemed at the time, I am an optimist at heart and jumping off a bridge isn't something I'm ever going to actually do.

Secondly, same bridge a few years later, I encountered someone contemplating a jump and tried to talk him out of it. Relating the above and pointing out that life had turned OK after all didn't do much to dissuade him. Convincing people not to do it is not as easy as one may imagine. I soon figured that everything I said was just making matters worse.

Anyway, thankfully, I manged to flag down a passing ambulance and they were able to handle the situation much more calmly, he didn't jump.

One of the paramedics told me not to be hard on myself for not coping so well, she said the ones who are going to jump just do it. The less committed are playing the idea through, like I was, and are hoping for some kind of intervention to help them out of their current mindset.

Chicago for sure. Both river and lake. I have seen a couple myself be retrieved.

Prevention is the best policy. Here is a Dutch public service announcement showing some effective solutions to the recurring problem of "micturition syncope", that makes it necessary to pull bodies (usually men, often tourists) out of the dark dangerous canals of Amsterdam, including the "grachtenplastuit" and the "krachtige straal" techniques.

Plassen in de gracht? Doe het doordacht!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMPm3RnRBuk

How many people drown in Amsterdam’s canals?

https://www.dutchamsterdam.nl/2152-amsterdam-canals-drowning...

I was surprised to know that you can swim in the Thames. There are a number of designated swimming spots along the Thames, where it is safer to swim. These spots are usually located in areas with calmer water and less boat traffic.

I grew up swimming in our local river. Obviously the river Thames is a different kind of beast with currents, etc.

However I nowadays would be very reluctant for swimming in rivers as soon as one is downstream of a sewer leading into the waters.

Furthermore the river I swam in is downstream of an area that industrially was heavily involved in galvanics. While the water itself is clean, who knows what heavy metals are still in the river bed and mud.

I can only imagine what the mud of the river Thames and its sources contains.

Oh and even in the mountains I remember how - on a hike - a friend contemplated drinking from that clear water stream shooting down the rocks and was glad not to have done that after seeing the poop from geese and cattle just a 100 m upstream.

Amoeba, E. coli etc are not fun.

Regarding drinking from streams, back in the mid-90’s I did a camping/hiking excursion with Outward Bound in the Appalachians of North Carolina.

We sourced all our drinking water from streams, using concentrated iodine to make the water drinkable (I think we had to wait 30 mins for it to take effect).

There was one part of the journey where we ran out of water and couldn’t drink from a nearby small river because it was downstream of a paper processing factory. And we had to go out of our way using old school topographical maps (which we used for all our navigation) to find another water source and hope it was available and flowing.

My comment of course was primarily about the swimming part (you involuntarily swallow some water).

Youtube is full of methods for making water safe on hiking trips / camping etc. Boiling can also be a honking great idea of course.

Boiling helps with bacteria, but not with toxic chemicals from factories. You need to capture evaporated water (or steam from boiling the water).

i worked for a university of london microbiology department in the early 80s, and one of my least favourite tasks was to go down to the thames (i used steps outside the national theatre) and get a couple of litres of river water for the students to experiment with. jesus, you would not believe the bacterial load in there! but i believe things have got better since then.

Never drink from a river that’s downstream of farm land (without thoroughly boiling the water), either. You might be thinking ‘yeah, cows and sheep poop outside’ but they also sometimes wander off, die and leave their rotting corpses in the stream.

> Never drink from a river that’s downstream of farm land

This. More so I’d be concerned about pesticides (arable).

Generally, I wouldn't get in the water anywhere after Teddington Lock, because it gets very tidal, very quickly. I grew up and lived in that part of London and sections of Twickenham are regularly flooded, plus cars are regularly swept into the Thames at Richmond despite warnings and it's very quick.

This link covers that whole stretch: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.444296,-0.3255391,15z?entr...

I have ended up in Thames somewhere past London Bridge, I think, forced into wading through the mud to try and dislodge our dinghy that my perennially headlong friend had gotten stuck, and IT WAS NOT FUN, not even Type 2 fun.

At the other end, by Teddington Lock Bridge, kids are always in the water. There is a weir not far, which I regard as a "drowning machine" because it is, but the area is quite agreeable.

Here's the Teddington Lock section: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4306101,-0.3207403,435m/da...

Isleworth Ait, seen here, is frequently so empty of water that one can see the boats keels lying on the bottom:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4684678,-0.3166315,1733m/d...

Street view showing how empty it is in both directions: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4672369,-0.3218927,3a,75y,...

This spot is especially not to be fucked with, as conditions can change quickly and the treated sewage from Mogden Works ends up here. I love the Thames and have never lived more than a short walk from it, but I have a nervous respect for it, plus I am a rubbish swimmer.

I wouldn’t swim in any bodies of water in the UK at the moment, there’s a massive scandal with the privatised sewage companies paying massive dividends to shareholders while neglecting the infrastructure and repeatedly dumping raw sewage straight into waterways.

> This article was amended on 14 February 2024 to remove some details for consistency with editorial guidance.

Too gruesome?

Is the archive at https://archive.is/Q8tZB before or after they did that?

It's before!

A couple I noticed (sorry, not at a computer right now):

> Only with decomposition will they begin to float.

> “There have been people that have jumped off Dartford Bridge and ended up in central London.

Completely unnecessary edits if you ask me.

I expect this was too comply with guidance on reporting on suicide [1]

> Avoid reporting methods of suicide

> Don’t refer to a specific site or location as popular or known for suicides

[1] https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...

These 'top 10 tips' have put us in a strange place re reporting on suicide. The news becomes very cryptic with a lot that's unsaid.

In Ireland, reporting on specific suicide events is almost completely absent as the effect is so dramatic.

Same with rioting in the north of Ireland. I grew up near a hotspot in Belfast and violence often went unreported to avoid the situation growing worse or spreading to other areas.

As a resident of the U.S. I always wonder once the headlines of the latest mass shooting appear if such events would be less frequent if they were never reported in the news.

By definition that's something that would be impossible to know.

Several sites withhold the shooters name, because often times a quest for notoriety is a goal for them. Denying this potentially removes some incentive.

The reverse is also true - since by revealing the name, all the friends and family members will feel pressure from their communities.

Plenty of people would consider the impact on friends and family before such an act.

While true I would hope that as a society we've moved past punishing people for the crimes of their family members.

Dartford is downstream?

I thought the same thing. Of course it is downstream, but I think this is why the person mentioned it: because the journey is surprising.

They're saying that powerful tidal currents caused someone that entered the water at Dartford to end up in central London. A very unexpected result.

Of all the possible swimming spots, a river is the one most fraught with mortal danger!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com