Shallow water is dangerous too
jefftk.com
jefftk.com
Cars, dogs, and water.
These are the big three common things that children interact with regularly that can, and will, cause irreparable harm or death with functionally no warning and virtually instantaneously. Kids also don't have the experience or the intuition to figure out if a situation is dangerous; cars move too fast, dogs are too hard to read, and water danger is hard to grasp even for adults (the number of people, including grown adults, I've seen panic and had to get pulled out after gleefully jumping into water where it turns out they can't reliably touch the bottom is fairly high).
The first two require some strictness (i.e. being very clear about rules like never going near a road without an adult, and never hitting a dog or pulling it's ears), but water basically requires regular swimming lessons from qualified instructors. It's something I wish happened earlier, and that more families had easy access to.
From 1 to 10, falls are by the far the biggest risk.
If you live in the US, firearms trump all of the above, but only in the US.
A learned fear, like the rest. There's no innate fear of falling.
My toddler recently went out on our roof to retrieve a football. I expected her to be a bit nervous, but she walked right up to the edge, no fear apparent at all. I had to desperately shove my instinct to yell for her down so I didn't scare her and distract her.
It looks like there have been a number of studies over the years, so not completely uncontroversial, unless there's something definitive you've read?
The point isn't that babies never fall off stuff, just that at least a part of the fear is built in.
You linked to an article about the visual-cliff experiment (apparently having not read it?) as it is what kicked off the avenue of research that came to this conclusion and which has been confirmed and uncontroversial since the mid-2010's.
It's also the lived experience of billions of parents.
There is no currently viable counter-arguments presented anywhere globally. There is more consensus about this issue than, for example, anthropogenic climate change or pangea or any number of other issues than reasonable people aren't expected to defend due to their overwhelming acceptance.
If you just float to open sea (typical tourist in a dingy or paddle board) you might need to get a "fun" helicopter ride from the friendly sea rescue services. Most people tend not to know that if the emergency is due to gross stupidity they will be billed afterwards (they are kind - so that is rare). Their rates are however significantly higher than regular tour operators.
So I do agree the lack of awareness is frustrating. If the locals stop swimming you should too.
But... Send me down under to Australia.and I would probably die in 5 minutes. Everything seems to be dangerous and/or poisonous there.
We are all to some degree "tourists" at some point in time with all that entails.
You may not fight it, you must use it and step out to the side.
The typical distance a rip current will pull people out is about 100m. Given that about 50% of the US population can't swim functionally at all, this can be very dangerous. However, it depends — 100m is not very much for an experienced open water swimmer, who might be used to swimming 1500-3000m routinely.
Most updated recommendations suggest people should ride the current until it stops and then signal for help and/or swim away from the current. This is to avoid exhaustion and because research indicates rip currents can go in different patterns.
If you know what you're doing and can swim that distance, it's not that dangerous. Experienced surfers would fall in this category, as they're used to navigating shore currents.
Like you hear people become exhausted and drown, when it is just so easy to relax and float around, even with waves washing over you.
> Dogs seldom kill humans directly. Rather, they are primarily a vector that transmits rabies
4th according to that confusing chart (confusing because mosquitos are off to the side).
I'm pretty sure the rural county in which I work hasn't seen rabies in a dog since like 1986.
I work in an emergency room (frequently caring for dog bites) in an area with numerous packs of strays. Dog rabies is always a concern, but I've never seen a confirmed case.
Just to go off of this, springs as well. Usually it's garage door springs or suspension of a car springs. People will DIY thinking it's a small thing but they can easily decapitate you. Some garage door springs have been known to level the families of entire neighborhoods or small townships. Garage door spring related deaths are far more common that you will ever know. Garage door springs also are known to be the main transmission vector for tetanus so if you survive the unspringing be advised there's a 90% chance it flung a deadly dose of tetatus and botulism (also grows on springs) into your every bodily orifice. You may think "well why is a kid fixing a car's suspension" but of course kids like poke around and explore because they're curious or they could be exploring your shop or your garage door mechanism.
Then it kinda devolved into nonsense and obviously fake info.
Was it meant to all be tongue in cheek? Sorry if it's a woosh moment.
I got my kids into swimming lessons on their first spring (was advised to avoid it during the winter).
And it's part of primary education in my municipality, with the express purpose of reducing drownings: it's not sport, the curriculum is 100% geared towards familiarity and safety.
Everyone's holidays are at a beach, so water safety is a constant concern, and looking at Our World in Data, Portugal had far worse numbers for drownings than the US in the 80s, but are much better now.
Also, the post isn’t about swimmable water—it’s a cautionary tale about how little it takes to drown. I can confirm that as one winter my neighbor drown in a shallow mud puddle off his back porch. He had a non-fatal heart attack and fell into it unconscious.
And because of that, drowning is the leading cause of death for children 1 to 4 years old in Arizona.
As a result, parents here are fairly fastidious about early childhood swim lessons. It's a _big_ deal for us. We've had both of our kids in lessons as early as a year, but a lot of folks start at 6-9 months.
If anything, the distributed nature of the many many many many _small_ bodies of water makes the drowning problem more pervasive and dangerous. An ocean is... well, an ocean: its availability for extremely small children is limited by geography, and many areas where you might take small children are policed by professional lifeguards. Backyard swimming pools, on the other hand, can be a lurking danger literally over your neighbor's wall. My parents had a neighbor one house over who had a 4 year old drown in their pool... from one house further over. He had stacked chairs against the cinderblock wall and climbed over while his grandfather was watching him but dozed off. Even if you don't have a pool in your own backyard, it's a risk here in Arizona.
Setting those aside, the canals for irrigation are more dangerous than rivers. The southern half is also filled with dry riverbeds that turn into raging rivers in storms. Finally, Phoenix itself has something like 4 lakes within an hour drive and the salt river that people float.
The heat of Arizona makes water recreation a huge part of life.
Whether or not someone learns to swim is dominated by what their parents raising them decide. It’s much more likely to follow an urban vs suburban/rural divide than any kind of geographic correlation.
It’s about access to water. If you parents don’t take you, if there are none around to naturally discover, if there are none around which you personally have access to, you don’t learn to swim.
If you do, you typically do. Simple as. I really do not understand why people seem to think everyone has a pool. You can tell many of the people in this sub grew up middle class at least!
As far as schedule goes, who’s taking care of the kid? At age 3 or 4 when you do this, it’s not like they are in school so some adult has to be around at 5:45pm.
You know how important swimming lessons are and yet just gave up and skipped it entirely? Or are you actually privileged and had other swimming lesson options for your kid and just didn’t want to bother with the affordable system’s constraints?
Lots of lower middle class/poor including me when I was growing up went to this without a problem. 25 cent public bus ride with mom was an adventure
Public bus rides in my area are 9x your cost, and 4x that cost for elderly people.
The Y and the bus haven’t turned into upscale things if that’s the point you’re trying to make.
Summer camps are expensive, like common.
Better swimming ed in school makes the gap narrower. I don't know any recent statistics, but I have seen statistics from the 90s and back then the US was amazingly apalling in that regard.
Edit: this is not comprehensive, but Jesus h Christ in a chicken basket: https://www.poolsafely.gov/2017/07/05/new-reports-fatal-drow...
Florida - http://www.cityofcocoabeach.com/523/Aquatic-Center-ClassesPr...
https://www.melbourneflorida.org/Government/Departments/Park...
- Has financial assistance
https://www.brevardfl.gov/ParksAndRecreation/AquaticActiviti...
https://ymcasouthflorida.org/swim-for-jenny/
https://www.southalabama.edu/departments/campusrec/aquatics/...
- Free for kids
I am certain you can find plenty of examples
I didn't start this thread to chastise anyone about it, but to express the idea that, in a country poorer than the US (on average), within 30 years, getting kids to swim early probably contributed significantly to close the gap in drowning mortality (and surpass the US).
Also none of my kids knew how to swim by the time they were 4 (as in the article) but all of them had had “swimming” lessons, which basically amounted to us spending around an hour in a pool with them.
All I can say from subsequent “close calls” is that, in my experience, even just a little familiarity helps a lot.
it doesn't really need to be explained again that some groups have more distractions and barriers than others, mostly by class
its great that your parents prioritized your aquatic acumen and has nothing to do with the tax bracket as a whole
This is why I responded to you, you obviously didn't understand the dynamic at work.
Us poor people weren't ALWAYS busy starving and surviving. Like other humans, we too had free time. And the local government subsidized both admission and lessons at the public pool. So because of good policy this was a cheap form of both recreation and physical education, as a result lots of us filthy poors in my neighborhood availed ourselves of it.
What I object to here is the othering of the working class. They're not creatures that need to be placed behind glass and alternately studied or pandered to. America had the formula figured out a long time ago: invest in public schools, public pools and public libraries that everyone can use, and that serve as community centers for rich and poor alike. When there need to be user fees, sure subsidize those for people in the lowest income brackets, that's a great idea. But the bedrock of a healthy society is good public institutions where everyone's treated pretty equally. We screwed this up when we started privatizing or just straight up shutting down all those things. Then the rich built their own, the rest increasingly went without and some people seem to have forgotten that the other way of doing things even existed.
I grew up poor in a trailer too but my mom made sure I swam. Never even had official lessons. We’d use public pools or visit a friends apartment pool, or sometimes just crash one. I just learned by exposure and playing with other kids. First in floaty then without. I’m better off now and have a pool in my yard but I also taught my kid early on, no lessons. It’s an important life skill and a huge hobby/activity that I feel most white peoples engage in across all economic cohorts
The US once had many community swimming pools prior to the civil rights amendment. Black people were segregated and few pools were built for them from their taxes.
Come the era of equal rights a great many pools were filled in rather than suffer the horror of mixed races in the same water. Private swimming pools and pools at clubs grew in number and it remained that few black people had access to community pools.
That was the case for a few decades, now hopefully past - but for a long time pools were associated not with swimming but with harassment and exclusion.
The forgotten history of segregated swimming pools and amusement parks
https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-history-of-segrega...
For example, in Florida: Taylor County (rural) has approximately 25 total public pools and bathing places
In Alabama:
Birmingham’s Parks & Recreation currently operates around 10-11 city‑run outdoor public pools, including Crestwood, Memorial, E.O. Jackson, Grayson, Underwood, Roosevelt, McAlpine, East Thomas. Though not all open every summer due to staffing or budget issues in recent years
Not everyone is "well aware of the history" despite your claim to the contrary so it's worth dragging events that occurred during my lifetime into the mix given they form the root of a particular part of why one American cultural group came to have values that became stereotypical..
Past actions leave shadows that by your own comment appear to still exist even if many have moved to the penumbra.
> Meanwhile, the black people i know well
Contrariwise the vast majority of black and not quite so black people I grew up with and know well swim like fish and a good number free dive toward the upper limit of human ability .. that's a whole other oyster shell of pearl though.
> but that was generations ago at this point
Perhaps for yourself, as mentioned above 1964 was within my lifetime.
You'd have to be an idiot in America not to know of all the wrongs against POC throughout history. It's all but obvious to a majority but just for good measure it's taught in grade school and a heavy component of a lot of movies/pop-culture. If you've made it far enough to be reading comments on HN, you're likely aware and don't need to be further educated.
Stats still show black people have very low rates of swimming skills. Who you know or who I know may differ, but stats are stats.
> Perhaps for yourself, as mentioned above 1964 was within my lifetime.
A generation is defined as 20-30 years, so this was 2-4 generations ago. My words hold true, you've seen a lot in your lifetime - despite all the issues we still have regarding race, I'd say you've seen blacks have a lot more mobility over your lifetime, but not a significant improvement of their swimming skills.
And that all the Western European countries have 0 deaths per 100,000 people must also be a distortion. A brief online search found this article according to which 4 million people where expected to visit Greece only from the UK in 2023:
https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/1209183/british-visitors-t...
P.S. I can't find if the data is counting deaths of citizens of a country or deaths reported in a country or what.
In 2021 The Netherlands had ~17.5 million inhabitants[1]. 99 people drowned[2], of which 19 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.56 or 0.45.
In 2020 The Netherlands had ~17.4 million inhabitants[1]. 138 people drowned[2], of which 31 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.79 or 0.61.
This is of course dependent on the per 100 000 being inhabitants. If it includes tourists the rates go way down, because millions of people visit. For 2020 and 2021 it adds 7.2 and 6.2 million people respectively, for non-pandemic years closer to 20 million[3].
[1]: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-bevolking/b...
[2]: https://www.cbs.nl/item?sc_itemid=7491f794-6e63-4556-bdcc-d9...
[3]: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/82059NED/table?dl=C...
That explains the discrepancy just fine to me. Most families in the US who expect to be around water a lot get swimming lessons for their kids, and most families who don't, don't. I had swimming lessons growing up and mostly they just reaffirmed my belief that I hate the beach more than life itself and will never, ever, ever step foot in nature's latrine.
A ballpark estimate for Portugal is that it costs the government probably 50 euros-ish per pupil for basic swimming lessons? Given that they cut drowning deaths by almost an order of magnitude in children, that seems like pretty good ROI.
A lot more rural people know how to swim because of all the natural bodies of water around, but our population overall has been consistently skewing urban for a number of generations now.
That swim ring was a bit loose. I was standing in the water, probably jumping up and down like kids do. Somehow, I lost balance and as my upper body fell to the side the swim ring moved from my waist toward feet. It stayed there and pulled my feet upward while my head went below the water. I was powerless to return to the surface as feet were stuck in that floating ring, forcing me upside down. Fortunately, a family friend noticed the situation and pulled me from the water. Near-death situation, and it looked perfectly safe.
A wave took me underwater and there were too many people in the pool for me to easily get back up. I don't fully remember how I got out of it, only that I was pushed underwater (I think I managed to get to the shallower end)
You should try this. I was a lifeguard for several years, and I think the key is that there are almost always signs a person can’t actually swim. They cling to a flotation device, they stand up to their tip toes in shallow water, they seem visibly uneasy in the deep. They’re the ones who are going to get in trouble, it’s comparatively quite rare for a strong swimmer to suddenly start drowning.
Safety
Wave pools are more difficult to lifeguard than still pools as the moving water (sometimes combined with sun glare) make it difficult to watch all swimmers. Unlike passive pool safety camera systems, computer-automated drowning detection systems do not work in wave pools.[11] There are also safety concerns in regards to water quality, as wave pools are difficult to chlorinate.
In the 1980s, three people died in the original 8-foot-deep (2.4 m) Tidal Wave pool at New Jersey's Action Park, which also kept the lifeguards busy rescuing patrons who overestimated their swimming ability. On the wave pool's opening day, it is said up to 100 people had to be rescued.[12]
9-year old just died last Thursday at wave pool in Pennsylvania: https://archive.ph/vlSad
He somehow jumped from the side and "capsized" ending up with his head underwater, so the ring kept him in that position.
I was playing with my daughter facing the other direction and didn't notice until she pointed him out, I fished him out and he had somehow kept his breath (it was some seconds, not minutes) and kept playing as if nothing happened soon after.
I was scared shitless.
Little kids can drown in as little as 2 inches of water. They can drown a bathtub that's mostly empty.
Years later, when I was taking the lifeguard class in high school, one of the first things we were taught is that you can drown on dry land with a tablespoon of water. I remember that to this day (that was back in 1980).
These days, my head is on swivel at the pool. . . And I'm not the guard. Just paying attention to all the little people. And during water aerobics, I watch the adults in the pool who are not good swimmers.
Water is scary. I have a healthy respect for it.
I know you can down in very little water, but really a tablespoon? How does that work? Is this a literal claim, or more of a cautionary hyperbole?
Similarly, intoxication vastly degrades the instincts that would otherwise keep you alive. I will never understand how people think getting drunk is _fun_.
Very interesting. I did not consider this case, as well as the mechanism the other reply described. Thanks, safety tip noted
>I will never understand how people think getting drunk is _fun_
Haha, I definitely do.
And, for oceans, rivers, and flood water: remember that 1m³ of water weighs 1.1 ton/1 tonne.
Also dangerous: low head dams. https://practical.engineering/blog/2019/3/16/drowning-machin...
Finally, don't sleep in or build homes in flash flood areas: (US): https://msc.fema.gov/portal/home
Children drowning is tragic, but this is nanny-state stuff. Are we to wrap literally any pond, lake, stream, fountain, etc. with a four-foot tall fence, because children exist? Imagine Central Park, but with the ponds surrounded by chain-link fences -- now that I think about it, I'm sort of amazed that New York City (where every other building is perpetually surrounded by ugly and useless scaffolding because one person died from falling bricks once) hasn't actually done this.
At some point, parents have to take personal responsibility for where their children run off to. Per TFA, the state the story took place in already had a law stricter than the one you're saying should exist [1]. It didn't prevent this incident. To the author's credit, this is not a plea for better laws, but rather, one for better parental supervision -- they knew there was a water feature, and still let the child run free.
So, PSA: teach your children to swim, and keep a close leash on the ones who don't know how yet.
[1] In many states (including PA, apparently, per TFA), it's already required that you wrap any standing water greater than 24" deep with a fence, even if you don't have children or ever intend them to be there.
If you as an owner, a professional, or even the labourer circumvent these rules and a child dies in the pool, you will likely be criminally charged.
These laws started to be introduced in the late eighties as pools started to be more common place. So I was curious about how these laws had effected drowning deaths since they were introduced. Turns out that drowning deaths in pools for kids under 4 have decreased 5% per year for the last 20 years [0]. That's about 500 kids lives saved in twenty years at the expense of every pool in the country being fenced - about 1.6 million pools. (Australia has the highest per capita private pools in the world.)
At an average cost of about $5k for a pool fence, you could suggest saving each child cost about $16m.
Drowning deaths in other age groups and other locations have not really changed in that time.
Even then, I have never seen any natural waterway, river, creek, beach or whatever being fenced, not even man made natural ponds in public parks.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S132602002...
> Turns out that drowning deaths in pools for kids under 4 have decreased 5% per year for the last 20 years [0]. That's about 500 kids lives saved in twenty years at the expense of every pool in the country being fenced - about 1.6 million pools.
OK, well...it's a (big) assumption that the laws are the reason for the decline, and moreover, that every part of every rule you described is necessary for the declines.
That's the fundamental problem with these kinds of things -- the "if it saves even N>1 lives!" crowd appears, ignores causation, and ratchets up the strictness of rules -- never the other way around. So you end up with fencing rules around 11" inch-deep puddles of water, and full-employment programs for lifeguards, when maybe one or the other would have been sufficient. Or something else. And maybe next time, they will want to fence the fountain at the local park.
Beyond that, I don't like to engage in "value of a life" debates, because there's no upper bound on emotion. But I should say that your numbers left out the cost of the lifeguards.
[1] Because heaven forbid that a motivated child climbs said fence. If your fence is insufficiently slippery, you will be liable! I'm not joking.
Many of the rules are similar, because they are generally commonsense rules. Australia has a few extra ones. No more than a 10mm wide protrusion within 900mm of the fence externally or 300mm internally, unless the fence is higher than 1.8m. This includes trees. You cannot open the pool area into any internal area, regardless of door safety features, even if that internal area is a locked shed. You must have a minimum 750mm clear zone around at least 75% of the pool. You have to get the pool fence reinspected and recertified every 3 years (this may differ state to state). There are lots of fines for non-compliance.
>it's a (big) assumption that the laws are the reason for the decline
It was not so much an assumption as it it was a presumption, which if true sets a lower bound on the cost. Drownings were getting pretty common in the 90s in Australia as the pool ownership started to take off, and at that time private pools accounted for around 45% of the drowning detahs for kids under 5 [0].
I do not doubt that public safety campaigns and public pool safety are also a big part of the decrease, but add to that the massive increase in not just backyard pools but also population. The fact that the fatalities have decreased during this period points to a sizable proportion being from the laws.
>I don't like to engage in "value of a life" debates
I mean, no one does. I think they can be illustrative though. Taken individually, each pool fence that saved a life only cost the parents $5k. Well worth it. And altogether, while it may sound crazy that so much has been spent to save so few lives, in context the average family pool costs around $30-60k. So the cost of putting the infrastructure in place for the kids to drown in the first place is an order of magnitude higher than the mitigations. If you wanted to look at it that way..
Sure, better stats always help to focus appropraite spending. Though I wasn't really making an argument one way or the other (just sharing my curiosity), I would point out that it is really easy to discount the importance of a safety feature after it has solved the issue. Y2K anyone?
[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/ABS@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca2...
Yeah, this kind of thing is exactly why NYC has scaffolding on half of the buildings, forever. Huge backlogs and high costs for "recertification" of situations that rarely ever change and carry miniscule marginal risk, due to aggressive laws.
> It was not so much an assumption as it it was a presumption, which if true sets a lower bound on the cost.
No, it's an assumption. There's a difference between "drownings might go down if we do something to limit them" (i.e. "presumption") and "this SPECIFIC SET OF RULES is therefore the thing we must do to save lives" (what is actually happening).
> Taken individually, each pool fence that saved a life only cost the parents $5k. Well worth it.
OK, let's be clear: if you build a pool and have kids, then I have no argument against you being required to put a fence around it. I agree with you that the marginal cost is trivial. Same thing for hotels, rentals, etc. Some regulations make sense.
I start to disagree when these rules are applied to everyone, everywhere, in all circumstances. Many US states impose these rules on people who don't have children, don't live near children, etc. And of course, the comment that started this thread was demanding that we wrap every body of water, everywhere, with a fence "if a child is expected to be present".
If a child comes wandering onto my (hypothetical) property and falls into my (hypothetical) garden pond and drowns, that's the fault of the parent. Particularly so if I've already got a fence around my property, live far away from people, or any number of other factors that sensibly mitigate risk.
Sorry if I'm being too literal here but are you saying that, for half of the houses in New York, it's true that someone died because a brick fell on their head from that house?
Half of all the houses? That sounds like a real problem that should be fixed somehow.
[1] there might have been two, but they were separated by years, if not decades. It wasn't a common occurrence.
Er, no?
Learning about dangerous things is a critical part of growing up. Fencing off dangerous things does nothing. Education and care and relevant, proportionate ideas about safety is what’s needed here, not nanny state over-reach.
(Source: parent of 2 boys who grew up in North Cornwall, where the community reaction to the (insanely dangerous) local sea is to learn about it, get in it and be aware of your limitations)
Theres a saying that comes to my mind, I think it used to be a lot more common.
"it only takes 6 inches of water to drown"
Fall funny, get nocked out and land in a puddle or whatever, or cant lift your head out of it for whatever reason etc etc.
I am VERY conscious of water & my kids, being a scuba diver myself I have a fair respect for the sea as well, and still we have had experiences that left us a little shook.
[0] https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/rescuing-drowning-child...
If you are taking care of someone with autism around water, be super aware of that.
A child with autism is 160x more likely to die from drowning vs the general population [1]
[1] https://nationalautismassociation.org/resources/autism-safet...
You still shouldn't let them be around water unsupervised, but it can buy precious minutes when it matters and give parents some peace of mind.
Learning how to be careful is really important, and weaker swimmers are often more cautious.
The other big problem is that you might be safe but someone less skilled copies you. I was being very careful in knee high shallows near a well sign-posted rip in South America, and some teens got in and got taken out by it. Fortunately they made it back (nobody near could have helped them).
Or even in the USA: "TikTok discovered scenic Eagle Falls; then 12 people drowned" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44446535
I've definitely had some close calls from poor decisions in rivers and the sea (I can be reckless at times).
[1]: https://www.midilibre.fr/2022/08/01/un-enfant-de-3-ans-se-no...
I let my four year old do this because I didn't realize how dangerous it was. I've since learned more about the risks, both through personal experience and from reading more after, and I most certainly wouldn't make the same choice now.
Why didn't the aunt think to just go get her instead of calling you over to say "Hey so I know you told her to stay away from the fountain, but what about her walking around the rim of it, is that dangerous or not?"
HN isn't just for tech, it's for anything that satisfies intellectual curiosity. It's not always obvious in advance what will turn out to satisfy intellectual curiosity, but if a good discussion develops, that ends up being the most important signal.
It does not take a genius to figure this out. Would he have left his daughter in the bathtub unsupervised? Would he have let his daughter walk around the rim of the bathtub if it were up to her elbows?
I can almost guarantee that he would not have let her go freely at a place with a 2 foot deep kiddie pool, so why let her run freely around the yard with the 2 foot deep mossy pit?
To me, it’s a signal that this person should not ever be involved in any safety decisions in any product that interfaces with humans and the real world. They simply don’t have the proper risk assessment faculties.
My aunt is in her 70s, and no longer very fast or loud. She was also much closer to me than to my daughter (but my view was blocked by vegetation). Even if she had seen my daughter fall in, getting me to respond would still have been much faster and more effective.