When I was 12, I went on a week long hike as a scout. We decided to swim across a lake, and 1/2 way through, I got tired, and tried swimming back, but couldn't.
I remember having the presence of mind to yell out help before blanking out. My closest friend in the troop luckily turned around, swam back to and drug me back to shore.
I was scared of the water after that, but some how ended up fighting my fear and earning the swimming merit badge, which for a weak swimmer, was no easy task.
For his heroism, and because I had overcome my near death experience, we were both recognized for embodying different aspects of scouting.
That incident in the lake inspired my friend to go on to become a life-guard.
Both my kids started swim lessons in infancy, and my oldest son gets compliments for his swimming skills while at the public pool. Though the pool we use has life guards, I never for a second take my eyes of my kids.
Maybe one day they'll go on to be life guards prior to college.
Something similar happened to me as a kid, I decided to swim from our boat to the shore of the lake, got exhausted 100 meters from the shore. Before going in full panic mode I remembered you can basically float indefinitely on your back with very minimal effort and did just that until I was calm and rested.
Turns out our mandatory swimming lessons from the age of 8 weren't as useless as I thought.
I can attest to this method. Similarly to the GP, at some point in my early teens while swimming at a small lake, I decided to try swimming across the lake (more of a cove) and back. I was never a great swimmer but I was confident I could make it because I knew I could just flip over and leisurely kick if I got tired. Sure enough, my arms started to burn about halfway across, so I just flipped over and eased the rest of the way.
It's not nearly as fast as "proper" swimming but I'm sure I could keep it up approximately as long as I could walk. Maybe even longer. It makes for a great option in dangerous situations, and is likely a good fundamental technique to teach anyone just learning.
Nethertheless:
I did this in the ocean once about 200m off the shore (at that point I wasn’t really in trouble and just wanted a rest) and the waves were too high and I ended up eating a lot of salt water and nearly choking and sinking. It put me in a far worse situation than had I stayed off my back.
The lay on your back technique works for those who it works for, and it should absolutely be taught to everyone just so that whoever it works for knows about it and uses it when they find themselves in a situation when it could save their life. Less drowning in calm waters is a net positive. But there is a percentage of the population who can’t simply float.
Some of us literally sink if we don’t swim.
One time my friend looked at me in awe as I laid on my back, relaxed, and sunk. We tried it over and over again. I was as curious as she was. She had to put her hands under my body to keep my body above water. When she removed her hands I’d begin to submerge, just laying on my back, arms stretched out, until I was fully underwater. But she did the same and she would float.
I wasn’t tense, but rather relaxed and not panicking, since I could swim (the only way I know to stay afloat) and knew she was right there. And I mean, not that hard to just lie there calm and relaxed. I have to actively swim in order to stay afloat. And I’m not the only one..
Although strangely enough dead bodies float so what’s up with that?
Fat and air float. Muscle and bone sink. Your overall buoyancy depends on your particular combination of lung capacity, fat, muscle, and bone. Also, fresh water is not as dense as salt water, so it is more difficult to float in.
Decomposition produces a variety of gases that increase buoyancy.
It’s not just bones and muscle. Fat has different densities, too.
I have very high density fat. Although I’m more than 100 pounds overweight, I still sink like a rock when I get into the pool and exhale. If I inhale a lot of air into my lungs, I can usually keep my nose and mouth barely above water, but not much more.
In contrast, my wife is also overweight, but her fat is low density. There is nothing I have found that is capable of making her sink.
The times we have gone snorkeling, I have no problems diving and I have to work to surface. But she can’t dive for love or money, although she can get her face fully under water.
My feet sink if I try to float on my back w/o swimming. But there's another float called the dead man's float that works fine for me. It also works well in rough water:
Thank you for this. I don’t think we tried this technique — but yes my legs are usually the first thing to go down, pretty much instantly. And I have a shorter torso, longer legs (when I sit down with someone several inches shorter than me, we are at the same eye level)
I'm a tall, lanky guy and I can't float at all. Well I do float, but my point of neutral buoyancy is with my head a few inches below the surface.
That said I learned to properly tread water while getting my open water SCUBA cert and turns it it's really easy. Last time I tried, from completely fresh, I was able to tread water for 40 minutes before I got bored and quit. I probably could have done it for another 40 minutes, at least. This was in a pool though so I was relaxed and the water was calm.
This technique got me through Jr. Lifeguards. I would pretty much immediately get hypothermic in the ocean, turn blue and feel as if I couldn't breathe. I would float on my back and "jellyfish" - essentially flapping your arms in sync, sometimes doing a breast-stroke kick with the legs.
If the ocean isn't too rough, and you conserve your energy for dealing with waves, this works pretty well.
I think the skill of being able to flip onto your back and scuttle to wherever you need to go is more important than knowing how to swim (and I love to swim - I swam 2 kilometers just this morning). Unless you are in super cold or choppy water you should be just fine.
I have some very young nephews. As well as teaching them how to swim, we're teaching them how to flip over and float, just for this reason. If they can do that, and recognise when they're in trouble, then it might just save their lives one day.
This doesn't work for me. I was put on Concerta for 8 years, which essentially eliminated my appetite, so my bodyfat% is low enough that I sink in water unless I take very shallow breaths while keeping my lungs very full (90-100%). Otherwise, my head floats low enough that my mouth is underwater, or I downright sink to the bottom of a pool.
I want to commen just to make sure it's incredibly clear to never take your eyes off your kids around a pool. My youngest child nearly drowned in 2 feet of water with a ton of adults around. I never take my eyes off my kids around water now. It's too easy for something terrible to happen.
I was paddling with my 3 year old daughter by the shore while my 9 year old was playing with his cousin futher up the beach (and in front of the lifeguard station).
My father-in-law (late 60's) wanted to join the two 9 year olds who had swam a short distance to a sandbar, and were in knee depth water.
The old man got into difficulty, I dropped my daughter back with the family and asked my wife to have a look at her old man.
She said he was fine, he's been swimming here for years.
I recognised the pattern of short quick breaths and short quick movements. Each small wave was sapping energy from him.
I ran to help and reached him quickly. People nearby had recognised the danger but were too afraid of stepping out of their depth to help a stranger. Ultimately, nobody on the crowded beach was prepared to take any risk to themselves to help (which I can understand).
On arrival, I realised I did not know what to do. I held him above the water for a few seconds, which meant submerging myself for the same duration. He was now a dead-weight, who had lost all control. I repeated this twice more, until I felt there was a risk to my own safety.
I swam/dragged/paddled/crawled with one arm the short (12 meters) to shore. I was close to becoming exhausted myself.
Later that night over a bbq, the family asked why he simply did not turn around. The time between tiring, and panicking/exhausting he said was too short, and he was so close to reaching the sandbar.
My wife did not believe he had been in danger until that chat over the bbq.
He is alive today because one member of the family recognise the signs of drowning. Being inclose proximity to the lifeguard station which was manned, had no bearing on the outcome.
That is terrible. If it is OK to ask... was there anything special about those circumstances, like was there a specific reason like he passed out first or got hit by something? Or was still learning to swim? Before I read this comment, 11 to me seems like an age where you can start thinking about not watching them, and when I was 12 I used to go to the pool with just friends.
I don't remember, I think that he may have dove into the shallow end. I'll ask the wife tomorrow, she remembers everything! The horrible thing is that the pool was crowded, and so many other children were playing within touching distance while he drowned.
As a passable but not amazing swimmer I tried to swim not too far from an anchored boat to the beach while carrying my 1.5 year-old, and it was fine for the first 30–50 meters until he freaked out and started flailing his limbs in a way that made it really hard for me to keep his head above water while also keeping us both afloat and moving forward.
Thankfully some other people were also going from boat to shore with us, on a raft, and were close enough that I could shout at them to come pick us up.
My only take-away from this video is just how exhausting it is (to me as a non-lifeguard). It feels akin to driving on a busy roadway. Maybe you learn to size kids up, know better where to focus, who to keep track of, and what to look for. But still. Just going through four of those videos left me thankful it's not my primary responsibility. It did help.
I learned CPR back when you could get a lifetime certification.
A few years ago, I took a class taught through my employer at the time (VMWare) and got recertified. It had been more than thirty years, but not that much had changed.
CPR isn’t hard. Spotting the drowning person, that’s the hard thing.
A lake has caught me off guard once before. But as a fully grown adult. I jumped in to swim a distance I could comfortably swim in the sea, but the slightly lower buoyancy I had in the lake caught me completely off guard.
I was hundreds of meters from the shore when I finally admitted to myself I was exhausted.
Made it back fine, but made me much more cautious about swimming in fresh water.
Like others who commented I worked as a life guard and water safety instructor when I was younger. (Everything I am saying pertains to the US only.)
I rescued quite a few children, it's hard to see in this video because the video quality is poor and the camera is at an angle that is worse than what the lifeguard in the video is seeing. Overall this victim is fairly active and should not have been very hard to spot in person for a well trained lifeguard. (And they did spot the child.)
This is a weird video because:
There are lifeguard(s) but yet the pool is full of non coast-guard approved tubes and floatation devices such. Most places with well trained lifeguards would not allow this. They don't work, can be more dangerous than no PFD, and they make it harder for the lifeguards to see. The worst drowning incident I witnessed involved a child in a tube who got flipped upside down and couldn't get out of the tube or flip back over. (I was not a lifeguard yet when I saw that.)
I think things from my perspective are in a terrible state in terms of water safety compared to 20 years ago.
Something must have changed with insurance liability, as most places just don't even have lifeguards. Resort pools I see these days are designed in a way where sight lines are so poor lifeguards/parents cannot even see children in the pools unless they are in the pool and stay within 10ft of the child. Very different than things used to be. Pool designers have reduced depth & eliminated diving boards resulting in a false sense of security. Meanwhile the pools are no longer even sufficient to be used for teaching up to a point where a person can be considered a swimmer. I just got back from vacation and the resort we stayed at had a pool which absolutely terrified me. I was 100% in lifeguard mode the entire time my child was in the pool, and the pool was so bad I couldn't sit in one spot and see him, I had to walk the edge of the pool to maintain sight lines. (The pool in the video is not like this FWIW)
Fewer young people are supposedly physically fit and able to get to advanced swimming levels and pass tough standards like Red Cross. There are fewer places that even have Red Cross accredited programs these days as a result. Red Cross level instructors command high pay, and most places teaching swimming lessons these days are money making businesses that pay instructors near minimum wage and try to make the franchise owner wealthy. This is a relatively large change from non-profit Red Cross programs back in the day.
Red Cross has always refused to act as insurance for pools/resorts/water parks, and alternate private organizations now certify lower quality lifeguards & swim instructors and we have new things like "Shallow Water lifeguards" that can be paid minimum wage. These alternate private certification orgs train to a lower level but do act as insurance so they're very attractive.
I have a 7 year old, he's been through 4 private orgs so far. None have had Red Cross accredited programs. All of them have been super expensive but they're the only choice available. 3 of them did not have deep enough water and their instructors were not trained at a level for teaching to a full "Swimmer" level. None of the programs seem to focus on water safety and have strange practices like trying to teaching 5 year olds the butterfly and other high energy/low safety strokes without teaching elementary backstroke, breaststroke, sidestroke, etc.. which are more useful in emergency water situations. Most of the instructors I've seen teaching my child show poor enough form they'd have not passed a Water Safety course 20 years ago.
The whole thing is a giant mess. I have been considering getting re-certified to take over finishing my child's swimming lessons, but the course is hard to take these days. Which also explains why not enough 16-20 year olds manage to take it. And there are almost no pools left to use that are not privately owned and have deep enough water.
Also at least by the old standards when someone who was a Red Cross WSI calls someone a swimmer we're talking about a pretty high level. Someone who can't swim for 30 minutes to safety in deep water is not necessarily a swimmer IMO. Maybe standards have reduced. But that was a requirement at one point. And this is not something that requires elite physical fitness or stamina when you are trained to swim well. Some of the strokes are barely more physically taxing than walking if you're proficient. Non swimmers get a false idea about this because they mostly see competitive swimming which uses the taxing/fast strokes.
I just googled "elementary backstroke" and yeah... I'm in my forties, pretty proficient swimmer, and nobody ever showed it to me.
I watch my kid's lessons and I'm sure I didn't see it being shown to them. They got into what I google as "backstroke" straight away, without the "elementary" phase.
That's one of my favorites too! I didn't know it had a name either.
When I want to play around, I try swimming backwards. On my back, with my feet straight ahead and motionless, I stroke backwards with my arms so I move in the direction my feet are pointing.
When I took swimming lessons at the YWCA in Wilmington, NC (where they did after school daycare in the late 70s), I went all the way through their process. My next step would have been to get into SCUBA.
They never taught the “Elementary Backstroke” to us, even though this was Wilmington, NC and we were just fifteen minutes from the beach.
The backstroke I learned was more like the crawl, just done on your back. After a while, I stopped bothering to use my arms and did a lazy backstroke using just my legs. I could do that for hours on end. The lazy backstroke wasn’t YWCA approved, but it worked well in the ocean and in pools. The only danger was that you couldn’t see what you might be about to hit.
I was taught this in my university’s swimming course. They called it the survival stroke as well. I’m glad I learned it, because if I were ever caught out and needed to swim farther than normal, I could totally see myself making it back (although a lot slower)
I don't think that I was ever explicitly taught it as a child but at some point I stumbled across it by accident it's one of my favorite ways to swim casually. As someone else mentioned above, it totally feels like a jellyfish swim :)
I'm feeling pretty lucky now. My local pool is city owned, and while it probably doesn't get the funding it ought to, the specs seem okay. It's a half olympic size, deep enough (I think -- 3.5 feet at one end, 12 feet at the other), they teach elementary backstroke (among others) starting at the very first level, and while I'm not sure if the lifeguards are all Red Cross certified, I'd be willing to bet they are, since the pool has courses to become a Red Cross certified lifeguard (and it's really not that expensive).
> There are lifeguard(s) but yet the pool is full of non coast-guard approved tubes and floatation devices such. Most places with well trained lifeguards would not allow this. They don't work, can be more dangerous than no PFD, and they make it harder for the lifeguards to see.
These are for fun devices. They are not meant for life saving and they attract people to pool with waves.
Typically, lifeguards do police rules, but don't police inflatables or ordinary size.
> I have a 7 year old, he's been through 4 private orgs so far. None have had Red Cross accredited programs. All of them have been super expensive but they're the only choice available. 3 of them did not have deep enough water and their instructors were not trained at a level for teaching to a full "Swimmer" level.
Either you are exaggerating or was extraordinary unlucky or live in pretty bad area. My 6 years old trains in deep water after she learned to float as 5 years old in kindergarten. Kindergarten part is pretty standard. Kids able to float training in water where they can swim are standard to, other peoples kids who go to swim train like that too.
> None of the programs seem to focus on water safety and have strange practices like trying to teaching 5 year olds the butterfly and other high energy/low safety strokes without teaching elementary backstroke, breaststroke, sidestroke,
I doubt elementary backstroke and sidestroke were ever common things to teach. Breaststroke yes, but these two not. I was not taught that either. I also find dubious 5 year old doing butterfly - they may do some fun exercises potentially leading to that, but not butterfly itself.
There's a resort in Wisconsin Dells that I've been to quite a few times now, with an indoor wave pool. When we started going they had industrial clear inner tubes that you could bring out into it; about half the people in the pool would have a tube. As you say the pool was nearly impossible to monitor as a parent from the sidelines, but there were lifeguards all the way around. Every once in a while they would stop the waves and jump in to pull somebody out - once it was even my own kid! They removed the tubes a couple of years ago.
I was lucky as a kid, my parents kept sending me to swim lessons until I finally got it. I learned early how to do a side stroke, which is so relaxing you can keep it up all day.
I learned the side stroke, from my mother, and it saved my life. I was swimming too far in a lake, tried to back-float, but the waves kept going into my mouth. I got very tired and frightened, then attempted to side stroke to keep the waves from going into my mouth. It worked and I barely managed to make it back. It took longer to get back because I had to swim at an angle against the waves, but at least I could breathe.
One of the important lessons I learnt from a lifeguard is that movies depict a very inaccurate representation of drowning. The movies would have you believe that drowning is a violent and noisy event when in reality it is an inconspicuous and silent event. The victim cannot shout or call for help when they are struggling to keep their nose above the water level.
Another important lesson I learnt that sometimes when someone is rescued from drowning, they are at the risk of secondary drowning which can occur during sleep after the accident. Especially, if a child looks very weak and tired after a drowning accident, it is important to keep the child under medical care for the next 24 hours. Never take the risk of the taking the child back home in such a case.
Most depictions of things in movies are like that.
Films must show you something interesting, and watching somebody do trial and error painfully on a bash script for 6 hours is not as fun as a fast pace keyboard murder while screaming "i just passed 3 firewalls" with beautiful animations rendering on the screen.
If there is a camera, what you see is a lie. The difference between a national geographic documentary and cinema is just how big the lie is.
It's a bit insiduous actually, because some parts of the lie are subtil: rythm, speed, dialogs, personalities, agenda, resources... But they look real enough to make our natural social mechanisms trigger, and the lie then creeps into real life.
Like people now expect the police, the justice system, school or the hospital to behave in a certain way, and the reality is way less glamourous.
The chances we actually find, or even search for somebody that killed you (if it's not very obvious) are very low, not to mention a simple theft or ass kicking.
Most things are mondain and boring looking. That's why we are so fond of art.
Even national geographic documentaries are probably "lies" ... I just had the chance to get some basic insights in to evolutionary biology ... and boy is bloody mauling and devouring of prey just the tip of the iceberg.
Intraspecies rape and infanticide is pretty common out there. (Look up the penis of drakes (male ducks) and why it looks the way it does at some point)
Siblings competing for food with only a small percentage surviving.
The female tit (the bird ... not what you think) basically cheats so much that there is a possibility that none of the offspring is actually of the male that feeds them ...
> The female tit (the bird ... not what you think) basically cheats so much that there is a possibility that none of the offspring is actually of the male that feeds them ...
Pretty sure "cheating" and infidelity are largely human concepts. That's normal and natural behaviour for many species.
> "cheating" and infidelity are largely human concepts
It is normal behavior, yes. But it comes at the expense of the cheated on party. The term here is "parental investment" and is roughly how much energy a party has to invest in the offspring.
If the male tit builds the nest and provides food for offspring that is genetically not his it puts it at a disadvantage and it is definitely exploited by the female.
Again, "exploited"? Using that word in the context seems very... Off. It's not like the female tit is choosing to "exploit" the male. They're literally programmed to do that.
Think about it. In many species there is unequal parental employment. That's just how nature works. Is it really "exploitation" in the human sense of taking advantage of someone else?
But. If we're observing as humans and it appears to us that the one creature is taking advantage of another, surely that's just our interpretation from a very limited understanding of their world?
I have no idea where I'm going with this, but that phrasing still seems off to me.
I don't think I understand your objection. You can model a lot of human and animal preferences fairly simply, based on axiomatic preferences like "wanting to survive and propagate your genes". Unwitting parental investment in a gene pool you don't share runs counter to this fairly basic and well-founded definition of utility, and it's under this premise that words like "exploit" are used.
Just upthread, "rape" is used in the animal context too. You could similarly apply your argument to that behavior, claiming that the term has moral baggage that's uniquely human, but I think it'd be just as wrong-headed.
I remember reading about some sort of project that was analogizing the economy to nature and talking about balance and I nearly blurted out that there is balance in nature because so much stuff dies all the time. People who want to make the economy more fair naturally want to do it without the equivalent of stuff dying all the time. But nature is not a good analogy for that. Nature as a whole is beautiful and tends toward balance, but it comes at a huge cost to individual participants.
Crazy how this topic on drowning led me to your comment and led me down a rabbit hole where I am now ordering The Evolution of Beauty, Prum and The Handicap Prinicple, Amotz. Thank you for this comment
Nice! "Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach, Alcock" and "Evolution, Ridley" were mentioned in the seminars if you want to put some more books on the list :-)
What opened my eyes to all of this is when I saw a video of a seal raping a penguin. I knew nature was brutal, but that was an aspect I had never considered. Then I started noticing more and more information about it. Made me appreciate humans far more.
If you ever watched Nat Geo tapes in grade school from the 80s, things were much more graphic (and interesting and informative IMO). Somehow Western society has become so sensitive to depictions of violence that even educational films regarding nature are effectively whitewashed.
Our reluctance to produce informative graphic media has given people an unrealistically optimistic view of nature and life. This has warped social values and policy to our detriment.
> One of the important lessons I learnt from a lifeguard is that movies depict a very inaccurate representation of drowning. The movies would have you believe that drowning is a violent and noisy event when in reality it is an inconspicuous and silent event. The victim cannot shout or call for help when they are struggling to keep their nose above the water level.
My daughter, when she was about 2, fell over in about 2 feet of water in a lake and it was completely and utterly silent. One moment she was there and the next she was under and reaching up at me, bubbles coming out of her mouth. If I had been even remotely distracted I never would have known that she had gone under.
When I was a kid I was swimming in a children's pool in our backyard with my two younger brothers. One of my brothers was afraid to go under water. At one point, I turned around and noticed that he was underwater. It looked like he was making swimming motions as people normally do. I was surprised that he decided to do it, given his fear, and just watched him for maybe ten seconds. After some time passed I got concerned and pulled him up. Sure enough, he was drowning and I was just sitting there watching him.
I learned that day how non-obvious drowning looks. I still feel bad about it to this day, even though he ended up being alright.
Including sounds, which are almost universally added to the footage in a separate processing stage, and have no relation to what has actually happened on the stage itself.
Hah, have you got an example of this one? It's a very distinctive sound so it would be hilarious to hear it over a shot of some obviously non-Australian jungle.
I never learned to swim. At age 14 I felt like someone pushed me into the river at noon time, sun was very bright and there was no one there but me catching fishes alone, I fell right into the river. I didn't drown I figured out how to swim out of instinct - I wonder how common it is. This is one of the least things shown in movies that some people can end up swimming on their own without having previously learnt it.
"Secondary drowning" is another term people use to describe another drowning complication. It happens if water gets into the lungs. There, it can irritate the lungs’ lining and fluid can build up, causing a condition called pulmonary edema. You’d likely notice your child having trouble breathing right away, and it might get worse over the next 24 hours.
Both events are very rare. They make up only 1%-2% of all drownings, says pediatrician James Orlowski, MD, of Florida Hospital Tampa. [1]
What kind of intuition do you have about 1%-2%? I've a crappy grasp of probability. I'd say 1-2% is like being quite certain that you'll experience this or that within 50-100 tries/repetitions. That sounds rare to me. In case of life or death it's not a risk I'd tolerate, but I'd call it rare.
My intuition comes from other uses of "rare" and "very rare" in medical fields.
"In Europe a disease or disorder is defined as rare when it affects less than 1 in 2000 citizens." [1]
""" In the United States, the Rare Diseases Act of 2002 defines rare disease strictly according to prevalence, specifically "any disease or condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people in the United States", or about 1 in 1,500 people. This definition is essentially the same as that of the Orphan Drug Act of 1983, a federal law that was written to encourage research into rare diseases and possible cures.
In Japan, the legal definition of a rare disease is one that affects fewer than 50,000 patients in Japan, or about 1 in 2,500 people.
However, the European Commission on Public Health defines rare diseases as "life-threatening or chronically debilitating diseases which are of such low prevalence that special combined efforts are needed to address them". The term low prevalence is later defined as generally meaning fewer than 1 in 2,000 people. Diseases that are statistically rare, but not also life-threatening, chronically debilitating, or inadequately treated, are excluded from their definition. """
That's 1 in 2000 of the entire population. 1/100,000th of the US population drowns every year, which means that 1% of drownings has an annual incidence of 1/1million.
(This is annual vs lifetime but if you do the rough math under some basic assumptions, you end up easily within what you're defining as "rare")
Let's say you roll a dice with 100 sides. If you roll a 1, you die. If you roll anything else, you live. We want to know the probability you will die if you roll the dice 100 times.
One way we could do this is look at the probability you'll roll it on the first roll... then the probability you won't roll it on the first roll but you will on the second roll... and so on. But that's a lot of math.
The probability of an event (death) and its complement (not death) totals 1.0. So one way we can get the probability of death is 1.0 - the probability of life.
Okay, so the only way you'll live if is if survive all 100 rolls. Each dice roll is independent (surviving the first dice roll doesn't affect the second dice roll which doesn't affect the third). So each individual dice roll has probability 0.99 of survival. For joint probability, we can multiply these together. The probability of getting heads on a coin twice is 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25. So in our situation here, p(survival) = 0.99, and 100 times means 0.99^100, to get the probability of survival. 0.99^100 = 0.36. 36% chance of survival.
The probability of death is thus 1 - 0.36 = 0.64. 64% chance of death.
Counter question. How to calculate how many tries it would take to reach a specific probability for an outcome? For example, how many times do I have to roll the dice to have 90% chance of death? Due to my field of work, I'd solve everything by bruteforce, but I wonder what a more elegant solution could be.
Right, but I'm not going to nearly-drown 50-100 times in my life. I'd definitely put this in the "not worth worrying about" category.
Being a human and doing human activities carries a certain amount of risk. If we over-analyze things we end up either being too scared to do anything interesting... and if we start applying this "I"m scared of everything" mentality to parenting we fall into the "helicopter parent" trap which is even worse.
Being scared of being scared is also a thing. If water got into my loved one's lungs, I wouldn't take a 1-2% risk of them suffocating in their sleep. I only gamble with what I'm willing to lose.
Indeed, especially considering that this is "1%-2% of all drownings". It says nothing about how many people are suffering from this after a near-drowning and subsequently recover from a near-second-drowning. For all we know more than half of the near-drownings may end up with secondary symptoms.
Also we don't know how many near-drownings vs drownings there are. Lot of good statistical quiz questions in here.
"Is there still water in their lungs? Why doesn't it get coughed out once they are out of the water?"
No, it is not as simple as "leftover water from the drowning". Rather, due to the presence of the water in the lungs, which has been presumably expelled entirely, the interior of the lungs becomes irritated and inflamed.
This inflammation process produces it's own fluid which will slowly fill the lungs and "drown" you - especially while you are prone, while sleeping, wherein the fluid pools along the entire length of the lung, rather than just filling up the bottom of the lung.
The water (and chemicals) in the lungs irritate and damage the lungs, which causes inflammation, which causes fluids to build up in the lungs, which eventually causes suffocation.
Yeah this can happen because the bronchi in the lungs is covered with this "teflon" like non-stick coating that prevents the lungs sticking together when breathing out. When a person inhales water in a near drowning this coating might get washed away resulting in the bronchi to get stuck. This will reduce the breathing capacity of the organ could result in hypoxia. Therefore after near drowning supervision in a hospital is a good idea.
There was a video my fireman friend showed me a while back of two men drowning near a drainage pipe. There was a chunk of floating hardwood or something that they wanted for some reason, but neither could swim (I know, brilliant). The only violent and noisy parts of the incident was then frantically trying to swim back to the banks for about a minute. After that, they seem to lose all energy, go still, and sink shockingly fast, like rocks.
In Toronto, children are tested for swimming ability at each visit to a public pool. Children are given wrist-bands corresponding to their age upon arrival. If a child wishes to swim in the deep end, he or she may ask a guard to give them a swim test (swimming a fixed distance without touching floor or wall). Upon passing the test, the child is given another wrist-band indicating that they may use the deep end. Parent:child ratios are also strictly enforced for younger children.
Wow I think the only time I've ever had a pool give me a swim test was for Boy Scouts summer camp where it's 75 yards front stroke 25 yards backstroke and then float. Then you get a little tag you place on a board and you always have a swim partner with periodic checks where everyone gets out finds their partner and they count pairs to ensure no one's missing or without a partner.
Same at our local pools in Portland, OR. They have to be able to swim 25 yards on their fronts and then 25 yards on their backs (without ever touching a wall) before they are allowed in the non-kiddie pool.
All in all after watching several of their videos I feel like I do a good job of recognizing the drowning person, but I’m amazed at how quickly the lifeguards spot it and dive into action.
Even knowing that in this short clip there is absolutely someone drowning I still have doubt, but the lifeguard who doesn’t have that context is already half way to the person by the time I’m sure.
The guards actually have a lot more context. They have been watching the people in the pool and have mentally sorted them by how much attention they need.
They have also been staring at the same pool for hours and their brain is ignoring all the visual noise that is distracting you. They also have the benefit of stereo vision and sound.
I agree with your general point but I think some of the assumptions you've made aren't quite accurate:
> They have also been staring at the same pool for hours and their brain is ignoring all the visual noise that is distracting you.
I'd suspect mental fatigue would counteract any benefits you'd get from increased filtering. Which, I assume, is why life guards are generally rotated regularly.
> They also have the benefit of stereo vision and sound.
Sound might not be of much help here because drowning is usually something that happens quietly (as the linked site also explains).
I meant "hours" cumulatively, so their brain is ignoring all the background stuff that is competing for our attention in these short clips because it's all novel stimulation to us.
Drownings in progress are often quiet, but that doesn't mean there aren't useful audio cues (splashing that stops, a kid who is no longer laughing or shouting, etc)
The sound of the videos is awful and little use, but I would guess, in reality, hearing can help too. And humans are exceptionally able to focus their attention on a single sound source.
In general, I would assume, like with driving, the job of the lifguard is a bit automatic, where the mind on its own filters out the ones, which might need stronger attention.
On at least one example I heard constant frequency splashing - it was the drowning person, they were going under and coming up rhythmically so the sound was helpful.
A little bit of training goes a long way, I imagine. There are specific risk factors to watch for, not just waiting for a kid to start drowning. Most (not all) of the videos I saw were of a kid falling out of a tube first.
When I took the Lifesaving merit badge, they said that lifeguards have to carry the whistle because it will get in the way if they wear it around their neck when trying to make a rescue.
Lifeguards in my area have the whistle on a wristband for that exact reason plus so they don't accidentally drop it while fumbling around with it when not paying attention
How long of a shift do lifeguards even have? Because I wouldn't feel confident in being able to observe a bunch of people in a pool for hours for what are quite subtle clues.
The lifeguards at my local (city) pool rotate very frequently; I’d say every 15 minutes or so. Their shift is longer of course, but they aren’t sitting observing for more than around 15 minutes at a time.
Semi-OT: it came up in an earlier discussion that the 15 minute rule is common, and makes for better attention fatigue management than Uber has for SDC test drivers.
I was a lifeguard at Disney World (Disney lifeguards work the waterparks, all the resort pools, and the pool and the lake at the private cast member park, Mickey's Retreat) in the late 90s. I believe at the time it was 20 minutes on duty, 5-10 minutes rotating to the next station. There would always be a couple lifeguards rotating in this scheme and they'd able to assist if necessary.
It was very boring, and keeping my mental acuity sharp towards the end of shifts was a problem. Take care swimming late in the day.
Also, I don't ever swim in public pools anyone. We had to shut down the cast member pool one 4th of July because it was so dirty and so soiled, we couldn't see to the bottom of the deep end (6 feet / ~2m) and it presented a drowning hazard. The pool was closed for like 3 days after that while we waited for the water turbidity to go down.
I think a pool closed for 3 days indicates gross mismanagement of chemical levels, not that contamination in public pools can’t be successfully managed.
In theory a public pool under proper management should be cleaner than a private pool which almost certainly isn’t being professionally managed.
Chlorine in pH balanced water with the right hardness is surprisingly effective. Pro tip, if you can smell “chlorine” it probably means the pool is dirty and doesn’t have enough chlorine left in the water. The smell is not chlorine in the water, it’s the result of the chlorine burning off as it oxidizes contaminants.
Yeah, the smell is from the combined chlorine (choloramines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloramines). After having my own pool for 10+ years if I smell chrloramines in a public pool I won't go it in as it -- likely it is not managed well at all.
I worked as a lifeguard at a lake's swimming area as a teenager, and I think it's a little less difficult than it sounds. It's not like staring out and hoping your peripherals catch something.
Guards typically have discrete areas they cover, and within those boundaries you can check for a certain number of people and boundary crossings. By doing things like mentally running through the list/number of people in your area and noting the higher-risk ones, it's a little less mentally taxing than you might think. Combined with some overlap between guard stations and regular rotations between areas, coverage can be pretty good. The real difficulty comes in when you start adding numbers of people- the boundaries become less clear, the number of high-risk swimmers increase, and the total cycle time through everyone you're covering increases such that your margin of error between a situation presenting and your time to react starts decreasing.
Anecdotally, I always found the behavior changes from a normal to tired swimmer to be one of the easier parts. Lack of forward motion, intense focus on the activity of swimming itself, falling behind from a group. Again, it's more difficult the more crowded an area becomes.
I was a lifeguard at the YMCA, and we would never be on duty for more than 45 minutes at a time unless we were short staffed. You were constantly rotating and given short breaks or small tasks to keep sharp.
Of course the lifeguard has extra context by just being in the same space with these people beforehand. They're probably already watching certain people more closely before the video starts while you and I enter the space cold (and through a fixed window).
Almost certainly. Of the saves I made over the years, the only one where I wasn't already giving the victim extra attention for 5-10 minutes was a seizure.
In this video I recognized pretty quickly who the drowning kid was, well before the lifeguard jumped in, but upon further reflection:
1) I was already primed to find someone drowning; I knew based on the video title that there was someone in danger. For a lifeguard, it's probably common that they'll go through entire shifts without having to jump in.
2) Even after identifying the right kid, I had doubt: I wasn't 100% sure until the lifeguard jumped in and confirmed my choice.
I never got to properly thank the 15-yo lifeguard who saved my 7-yo from certain drowning in a crowded artificial lake pool.
We turned away for what only seemed a minute and he was going under. He was slightly blue in the face when the life guard brought him out.
The weird thing is he didn't fight or flail. He just sort of faded away into the water, and it struck me as especially weird that he didn't seemed scared at all after.
It has haunted me ever since just how easy it can be for a child to drown. Many swim lessons for my child later, I still watch him like a hawk and insist on life jackets in any moving water conditions.
Bondi Rescue, a series on Netflix about a team of Australian lifeguards, is instructive and entertaining.
I am curious, hope this is OK to ask as I have a 7 yr old...
How would you rater you 7-yo swimming ability when this happened? For example could he swim 20 meters (~60 ft)?
Also I might watch that Netflix thanks. I don't go to Bondi much but Manly beach a few km away is interesting. They are always yelling at people who are swimming in the dangerous current area and it takes several whistles to get them out. I usually give 'em a gentle yell too if I am there on a surf board :-)
I almost drowned in one of these wave pools as a teenager and I had been swimming every summer in swim camps (so a decent swimmer).
In my case it was because there were so many people in the pool that I could barely move, after struggling to breathe a few moments I had to exert myself to climb up someone else's inner tube to gain my breath. But I do recall spending most of my time barely above water and struggling to breathe. Could have gone very bad.
My mom used to tell how I almost drowned one time in a swimming pool when I was about five. I got stuck under a floating mattress of some kind. It definitely made a bigger impression on her than it did on me. I can (vaguely) remember the incident, and I don't remember freaking out or being scared of water (or mattresses) afterwards.
Might this be similar to the stress/shock introduced partial memory loss, as it often happens with heavy accidents, where the accident itself isn't remembered by the patient?
It could possibly be from oxygen deprivation, especially if they passed out, but without knowing the specifics of the case (did they inhale water/did they go unconscious) it's hard to say for sure.
> Parents – children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.
If you're a new parent and haven't heard this advice before, this is one of the key takeaways. It also applies any time young kids are playing out of sight. If your kid is in their room and it gets quiet longer than usual, it's a good idea to go peek in on them.
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning [1] has gone round the internet a number of times over the last decade. Well worth reading if you spend time around water, and a good read in any case.
Thanks for this. I hadn't read it before, and it's quite interesting. In particular:
> One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you alright?” If they can answer at all – they probably are.
When I was a kid, I spent a few summers learning to sail. Part of our training included responding to falling overboard or capsizing our small boats with crews of two. Our instructors insisted that whenever this happened we first call out to each other, "Are you okay?" and confirm it before attempting to right the boat. I never understood why, but now I do.
I remember watching the Discovery channel series BUD/S 234 about SEAL training, it stuck out to me that during their swimming test where they're required to swim an entire lap of the pool underwater that the first thing they're required to do when they come up is yell "I FEEL FINE" as loud as they can.
Anyone who didn't do so was instantly hauled out of the pool and sent to the medic. Which was good, because some of the men were unconscious when they got there, though they still passed the test! The requirements were to swim down, touch the far wall, swim back, touch the near wall, all while remaining underwater. State of consciousness was never specified :)
It seems like spotting drowning children could be a good use case for computer vision, at least as a backup. The heuristics for a drowning child are pretty marked, but they're hard to spot for humans distracted by lots of other stimuli.
That'll teach me to pay more attention to the details rather than going "Welp, there goes my start-up idea".
Yes, that doesn't look great - I assumed when I saw it was underwater that it was effectively looking up at the people on the surface and detecting people in distress from that angle. On closer inspection that doesn't seem to be the case.
You wouldn't sue yourself as the parent/guardian of the child - you look around for someone, anyone to blame.
When I took a 5yo to a pool which had multiple lifeguards I put her in a lifejacket and stayed within arm's reach of her. Playing in a pool is great fun but it is very high stakes. No way I am going to leave a child in such a dangerous situation and hope it works out. Making sure your child survives a trip to a pool is your responsibility.
I am impressed by these videos any time the pop up on hacker news. But one thing struck me: that they are using those large floatation rings. A lot of the incidents seem to be where a child looses contact to the ring and then cannot swim on itself.
I am wondering, why they are allowed at all. In my personal experience, I have rarely seen such rings in public pools and that basically means, you are not getting far into the deep part of the pool without some basic swimming skills. Most people/children wouldn't even try as they don't feel comfortable with deep water without an aid.
Those are toys that are fun to play with for people who can swim fine. The problem is when non-swimmers use them as boats. They are not safety devices.
Without the rings non-swimmers couldn't get into trouble but swimmers have less fun. You could also pave over the pool with concrete and remove the hazard entirely - no fun for swimmers but all risks of drowning removed.
As someone who worked as a wave pool lifeguard for 8 years and is a current certified Water Safety Instructor, I mostly agree. The large rafts are never really what I have an issue with. It's water wings and other personal flotation devices that are much more troublesome.
Parents are a huge part of the issue. PFDs give them a false sense of security where they feel like they don't have to watch their kid. The best change my old pool ever made was banning them (besides USCG approved life vests). The rafts were almost never an issue unless parents stuck their kid in the middle and stopped supervising (which happened a lot and we'd yell at the about). Crappy parental supervision is the cause of most problems at pools.
Somehow people don't realize the danger that pools possess.
Swimming is one of the few activities that children engage in which can go so wrong as to end up in their death. I would suggest that it is borderline negligence for a parent to put a child in such a dangerous situation without proper precautions (supervision). I wouldn't let a small child I am responsible for go into a pool alone regardless of the presence of lifeguards. Especially not a wave pool.
> I wouldn't let a small child I am responsible for go into a pool alone
You would. Let me give you the scenario: you're home alone with the three kids, you've been chasing them around, doing laundry, cleaning up spilled grape juice, telling Jenny to stop cutting Tommy's hair, etc. Finally, you think everyone is down for a nap. You turn on the game. 5 minutes later, 5 minutes, you think "It's too quiet...". You get up and walk around for a couple minutes to find 4 year-old Sally's door open. No Sally. Where's Sally? Sprint around the house, run down to the kitchen, look in the back yard, and she's face down in the pool. You immediately get her out, desperate. You realize you have to separate from her to call 911. She's been unaccounted for by now for 12 minutes.
The paramedics get a breath back, but anoxic brain injury has set in. She dies, tubes in every orifice, 3 days later.
I have seen this play out more than once. My parents had a pool. I was a lifeguard, have made rescues. I was also on swim team, I'm in the Navy now, and I'm a physician. I surf, I dive, I do open ocean swimming and triathlons. I've helped rescue a diver in pulmonary edema. I think I wouldn't leave my kid unattended, but I know I might.
I've met the parents. They wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone either.
A friend's son was visiting, also four years old, vanished for just a second and suddenly I thought Oh god, the pool. Sure enough there he was stuck outside the fence trying to get to the pool but frustrated that the latching mechanism can only be operated by someone at least 5 feet tall.
I wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone. Pool safety is life and death. Get a fence.
That was an extreme example,the point is that kids can end up in the water in unexpected ways. Even parents that would never intentionally leave children in the water alone can end up in a situation where a child is unattended in the water. Perhaps a better example is when you have 4 kids to keep an eye on at a public pool, and you lose track of one while dealing with an injury to another, or reapplying sunscreen, or a number of other reasons to be distracted. Or what about the situation where you send your kids outside to play and they sneak back to the pool? No sensible person would let their children into the pool alone, but it can absolutely happen to even the most careful adult.
A pool needs at least two lines of protection. One day the three year old will drag a garden chair or the box someone left out to the fence and climb over it.
The houses in my new construction neighborhood all have pools. We deleted the pool and got almost no cash back, so far as I know we were the only family to do so. I'm not carrying that responsibility.
I don't know why my comment above was downvoted, but we did consider buying a house with a pool when our kids were young, and we decided that the risk was ETOOHIGH, especially given that we have a wonderful community pool in the neighborhood.
Pools are expensive to operate and dangerous to have children around -- your own as well as your guests'.
If I thought it would help I'd send my fence off to be trained as a Navy physician but it seems to be able to handle the task fine without the additional training.
I don't mind leaving my child unattended for a short period in a safe area. But not near a pool.
Of course luxury homes with their own pool in the backyard put rather a big strain on safety around your own home. Put a good fence around it, I guess.
Some countries and states with pool culture legally require a fence around all pools. As far as I can tell, New Zealand has a legal requirement for a fence for over 30 years. There is a little more info on other countries here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_fence
> I don't mind leaving my child unattended for a short period in a safe area.
...and safety is relative to this child's capability. My parents put me through extensive swimming lessons from a young age precisely so they could let me play unsupervised in the ocean. I'd been a half mile out to sea alone by the time I was 10. Turns out I wasn't as unsupervised as I thought; my mum was freaking out but, unable to swim, couldn't do anything about it!
But if the child can't swim, no alone pool time for them.
Exactly. My oldest son, now 10, has been perfectly able to swim on his own. We live in a former port area with lots of great swimming spots that he visits with his friends. But he's got his swimming diplomas (two of them, which I consider the minimum for this situation).
Sea, though, can be tricky. Half a mile out to sea, currents can be very different. I know that I as a kid once floated on a tiny inflatable boat quite a bit out to sea, and my dad swam after me to drag me back. I thought I could get back on my own, but my dad clearly wasn't entirely convinced.
It depends on the child's ability. Plenty of kids were swimming by themselves in the ocean at 8 or younger because they had a lot of experience or even doing competive swimming from younger ages. Most parents when I was a kid would set rules as too how far into the sea you could swim and that'd be it. I think this is common throughout the world in places close to beaches as I was.
I think the key is: learn swimming in an early age and then regularly go swimming. Swimming, not using floating toys. Children, who regularly play in the water - we did all kind of water-wrestling :) - can get extremely proficient at it.
Yeah I’m taking swimming lessons as an adult after totally failing to retain what I was taught as a child. You have to practice and play in the water constantly to develop any proficiency. To get a child to do that means they have to not be afraid of the water.
Can confirm, grew up near the sea, was free diving for shiny rocks and shells by 7 or 8 and would spend hours in the water every day of vacation. Parents had to basically drag me out so I wouldn’t starve.
Swimming is weird, right? Imagine if whenever you took a step outside you had to remember to put your foot back down or else you'd drift off into the vacuum of space. You could jump and fly around like a balloon but if you went too high you could never get back down. Swimming is that but upside-down.
The graph in your first link is absolutely fascinating. I found the number of "Unintentional Poisoning" and "Suicide" deaths especially surprising (due to the high numbers)
In the US children aged under 9 cannot be counted as a death by suicide.
Suicide means "the deceased ended their life, and had the intent to do so". The US says that people under the age of 9 cannot make a reasoned decision about killing themselves, and thus cannot have the intent to die.
So there will be some people under 9 who killed themselves. It will be a very small number. But their death will be counted as something other than suicide.
Unintentional poisonings have rocketed up the charts in the past few years. It didn't used to be in first place. That's the fentanyl crisis you're seeing.
Yes, life is dangerous, yet sadly most parents today take the approach of avoiding all dangers at all cost.
And of course you should not leave dangerous things around and make it as safe as possible, but how can one learn, how to deal with dangers, when all the slightest dangers are removed? That will only hurt later on.
One have to play with fire, to learn how to deal with it. If parents forbid it completely, kids will just burn stuff on their own. I did ... and luckily I never burned anything down. But friends of mine ... allmost burned down a village.
Fellow 90's kid-pyro checking in. I remember when my father finally found my stash of black powder, metal tubing, various makeshift cannons, and flammable chemicals. Didn't really get in trouble--he was relieved it wasn't something as dangerous as weed.
Among destructive devices built as kids in the 90s, I think our crowning accomplishment was the Thermite we made as teenagers... only possible thanks to my friend who was somehow able to acquire a big block of Magnesium. I provided the Aluminium baseball bat ;) We got lucky that it fizzled out partway through (maybe from hitting dirt?), but his parents were definitely not too thrilled about the nasty hole in the concrete patio.
Moldy? Psh, that's nothing. The real excitement begins when you play with the sweat coming off the dynamite, like we did back when I was a kid in the 80s!
Note: the above is sarcasm. "Sweating" or "weeping" dynamite is dangerous and you should immediately leave the area and contact your local equivalent of 'the bomb squad' to report it.
Over time, regardless of the sorbent used, sticks of dynamite will "weep" or "sweat" nitroglycerin, which can then pool in the bottom of the box or storage area. For that reason, explosive manuals recommend the repeated turning over of boxes of dynamite in storage. Crystals will form on the outside of the sticks, causing them to be even more sensitive to shock, friction, and temperature. Therefore, while the risk of an explosion without the use of a blasting cap is minimal for fresh dynamite, old dynamite is dangerous.
The most likely outcome from all the scenarios you mentioned is that nothing happens. Kids do these things all the time and are just fine.
Injuries occur occasionally, and even less frequently are those injuries fatal.
A friend of mine supermaned head-first into a tree while snowboarding last year. The tree was probably a foot in diameter, and he was going fast enough to shake snow off the whole tree. What happened? Nothing. We all laughed about it and kept snowboarding.
We are pretty resilient creatures when it comes to impact damage.
Drowning though, completely different. Much like filling a car's oil intake with dirt and then having the engine immediately seize. If you start breathing in water, you're do some serious damage to your lungs and cutting off oxygen to your brain, and further inhibiting basic survival functionality, and quickly resulting in death, if not remedied immediately.
Yeah, but drowning is way more common than the other ones. This is like saying, "Well, I am not going to wear my seat belt, since people also die from being struck by lightning"
Just because multiple things are possible doesn't mean they are equally probable.
I grew up near a lake in the Alps and I am quite sure that any floatation device in Europe that is not safe for leaving your kids unsupervised has a big warning sign printed on the floatatiin device itself.
An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.
>An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.
Those are widely considered NOT safe, a non-swimmer child is probably much safer without them than with them, as using them lulls the caregiver into a false sense of security and they pay much less attention to them. They also teach children the wrong posture for swimming/floating, which can be difficult to unlearn. In the US the common wisdom says that if you use them you must be in arms reach of the child at all times - but that's what you'd do without them anyway, so what's the point?
The idea that you'd leave a non-swimmer child unattended with them is, frankly, horrifying.
The problem there, though, is the lack of parental supervision, not the armbands themselves. The bands do keep the child's head above water. But no matter what, parents need to understand that you don't leave a small child alone near water.
Unfortunately those are profoundly unsafe. They only keep the child's head above water while they are slid all the way up to the shoulders. If they start to slip down the arms, which they are apt to do when swimming, they'll tend to slip all the way down to the hands and if the child isn't strong enough to pull themselves up out of the water it can keep them from being able to swim at all as it holds their hands up.
Try to imagine if you were less buoyant like if you had ankle weights on and someone tied two empty milk jugs to your hands. Your hands are suddenly not useful at all for swimming and you can't pull them underwater so now you're forced to hold yourself up by pushing your arms out.
Arm bands should never be used. Unless they're the kind that has a chest piece, there is a significant risk of them pinning a child's face in the water.
I'm not sure what inflatable things exist that go on a child's arms and they can't remove themselves. Water wings are considered quite unsafe.
Is it possible you are thinking of something like Puddle Jumpers (look up an image online), which look like water wings but strap behind the child's back, and don't actually inflate? Those are, indeed, considered safe.
Those are called "water wings" in the US and the person you were replying to feels quite the opposite about their safety; the ones I've seen available for purchase in the states are easy to dislodge accidentally.
The ones which are just placed on the arms and not tethered to each other have a failure mode where they easily come off if the child puts their arms straight up. Unfortunately, this is also a common drowning fear response.
In general, I want people to have full market freedoms, but I put those water wings pretty near lawn darts in terms of danger.
I'd call lawn darts safer, as the danger with them is a lot more obvious. Everyone understands that throwing sharp things at people will lead to injury. It takes a significantly more informed consumer to know that a product masquerading as a safety tool is ineffectual at best.
All of the ones I've encountered in Europe have a butterfly-ish creature on one side and warnings in a dozen languages on the other side - not a safe flotation device.
Most pools they aren't. I worked as a lifeguard at a large public park in the Midwest in High School. We trained with many of the other large public parks in the area. The only flotation devices allowed are US Coast Guard approved lifejackets.
Part of the reason for floatation devices is a transitionary measure to get them more used to and practiced in "preswimming" while participating and not simply wading or pool side clinging.
They are just often misused - you are supposed to be supervising them when they are in the pool period and they only need deep enough water to keep their feet off the ground.
Personal opinion, based off my own experience and teaching other children how to swim:
Flotation devices have no part to play in teaching how to swim. Parents (or teachers) holding their children and teaching them how to float is step 1. Only after the child can handle themselves in water (float, know when to breathe) should they be playing with flotation devices.
I agree with this. I was very late to learn how to swim and only learned finally at around age 10.
Previous attempts to teach me to swim used flotation devices. Without them, I was terrified of drowning.
A very smart swimming teacher, seeing my fear, taught me to float on my back, first with her assistance, then without it. Once I could float, she taught me to swim backwards, froggy style. I was afraid even about that, but she said "If you ever find yourself unable to swim, just float!" and I felt confident to do that.
From there, I was comfortable swimming on my front, because once again, I knew how to go on my back and float!
Then the rest was simple skill acquisition.
30 years later, I wish I knew the name of that swim instructor!
We should clarify that PFDs (life-jackets) are probably good for young children and new swimmers. It's the floating toys that might actually be harmful.
And one skill that swimmers need, but cannot really get with an float-assist device, is putting their face in the water. I watched an adult friend learn to swim, and this was REALLY hard for him. Crazy enough - he was ex-Royal Navy submariner, so he had passed basic water survival - he could float on his back, just couldn't do anything beyond that.
PFDs are a safety device, they’re great. If you think your child might be unsupervised, putting one on is safer than not. But as a teaching aide, they’re terrible.
You can’t swim with a lifejacket. You can only float (and in a position that is different from how you would naturally float in water).
Yeah, I wasn't super clear - PFDs are great if a new swimmer just needs to be in the water. My nephews used them at the beach when they were toddlers. But swim lessons were mom/dad/instructor holding them in the water.
> cannot really get with an float-assist device, is putting their face in the water.
We used kickboards for this exact purpose. So you can float face down with arms outstretched holding the board. You can transition to freestyle swimming taking one hand off the board at a time.
We used the same in school - mostly for training leg movements. Back then, everyone had basic swimming capabilities. But these kickboards are a totally different story than the blue donuts in the videos.
Arm floaties are a crutch that ought never be used. If your kid isn't strong enough to swim on their own, don't give yourself the false sense of security that comes with floaties.
As an anecdote, they almost killed a friend's daughter a few years ago.
She had jumped and fallen forward, and her arm floaties moved her buoyancy to her stomach-area, forcing her face into the water. Scary stuff.
She was even in a swimming pool she could stand in.
A real life jacket approved by the USCG or similar agency may be more expensive than water wings, but unlike cheap water wings, they are designed to keep the wearer's face out of the water. A type I or II jacket can turn some or most unconsious wearers rightside up.
I learned to swim using a float shaped like a miniature surfboard that I held out in front of me. This was both supervised and done in water shallow enough that I could stand with my head above the surface. If I had not been allowed access to this I am certain that I would have refused to go in the water at all (I was already very reluctant to do so even with the float).
Someone who can't swim on their own should only ever use a coastguard-approved lifejacket or other personal floatation device. because of the risk of users falling off, Float toys like inner tubes, rafts, etc are only safe for swimmers. If the pool is busy, it's probably safter just to prohibit non-pfd, since they can obscure the view of the pool floor. Unapproved floats, especially water wings, run the risk of deflating or placing a non-swimmer in a position where his or her face is underwater.
Also, when I was a lifeguard, one of the things that was sometimes hard to get to parents' heads is that "supervising" a non-swimmer does not mean sitting on the side of the pool reading a book--it's being in the water no more than an arm's length of the nonswimmer. Every second is critical in a drowning incident, so having a parent less than a meter away will almost always do a better job rescuing a kid than a lifeguard in preventing an accident
> Part of the reason for floatation devices is a transitionary measure to get them more used to and practiced in "preswimming" while participating and not simply wading or pool side clinging.
The reason for worn (handheld is a different story) flotation devices other than lifevests is to sell flotation devices; I've never found anyone who teaches swimming to children (or adults, but that's not the market for them anyway) that uses them, advises using them, or considers them anything other than a safety hazard.
If you want to get a kid used to “preswimming”, which as I've seen it is actually something mostly done with infants and toddlers (older nonswimmers usually seem to go straight from wall exercises to supervised short swimming with knowledgeable teachers) it's best to do it with an adult holding them, except for extremely brief transitions.
Please learn to swim. It's never too late. Plus, it's fun. Plus, it's classy. Plus, you won't be caught "in over your head" (sorry) in situations like this. Humans are meant to learn to swim IMHO. The instinctive response is just a "stub" that is expected to be built upon, similar to language ability and crawling->walking and other human things. (Humans don't naturally walk unless they are taught to, did you know that? Source: Sadly, a handful of humans were raised by other animals over the years, and none of them walked naturally when discovered.)
When I went to Cornell, learning to swim was a mandatory requirement. If you didn't pass the "swim 2 laps" swim test they gave you right off the bat, your first assigned P.E. class would be a swim class. (Apparently, one of the large Cornell donors stipulated this as part of his donation. Possibly, someone in their immediate family had died due to lack of being able to swim.)
You say you don't look good in a bathing suit? Swimming will teach you not to care. Hell, if you're heavy, staying close to the water surface is actually easier. And you can get great exercise WITHOUT putting the stress on your joints that pretty much every other exercise will do to you if you're heavy. (Note: I'm a bit overweight, so I get it. I get it.)
Did I mention it's fun? If you're an adult, you will feel like a kid again.
You say you don't live near a coast? Well, when you go on vacation and are near a beach, you can actually go into the water fearlessly! And surely, there's a pool of some sort nearby.
Don't be afraid. Don't care what others think. Please consider it.
Then you still need to think, to avoid getting caught in tough water with a muscle cramp, or getting caught by seaward currents during tides, etc, etc. So, yes, it's good to know how to swim, so that you can survive immediately after getting into water, but it doesn't automatically make you bulletproof safe in water :)
Thank you for this. Swimming is a basic human activity and everyone should know how to swim, at least to a "I won't drown at a pool party" level. It's like not knowing how to ride a bike.. it's really not that hard to learn, and there are no good excuses for an adult to not know how to.
How does one learn to swim with small feet? I tried to learn how to swim multiple times when I was a youth (grade school, middle school, high school). I could never grasp it and would always end up flailing my legs or slowly sinking. It was quite traumatic :)
Flippers. Flippers magnify your kick strength, you have NO IDEA by how much (like literally it must be 10x or more). They're inexpensive, and there's no shame in having them. They're easy to put on and take off.
I also scuba dive, and flippers are a necessity in that circumstance. There is a MASSIVE difference in propulsion with flippers. Since you can encounter currents in open water scuba diving, they're a lifesaver. (Scuba is super cool too, btw. But that's like... super advanced swimming. Baby steps.)
Also, arm strength. I actually think most of my propulsion when swimming comes from my arms, not my legs (I'm not saying this is the most efficient... it's just what I do... I never said I was a PERFECT swimmer, lol). Hold your fingers together in like a shallow "cup" shape, push front to back, then either lift them out of the water back to the front OR do what I do when I breast stroke and just point your fingers forward and push them through the water back in front of you in as "waterdynamic" a shape as you can figure out. And then reform the cup with your fingers/hands and push yourself through the water again.
There are paralympic swimmers with no arms or legs who can swim a length faster than me, and I'm a competent swimmer. I wouldn't worry about your foot size.
You don't really need your feet to swim. In my personal experience when swimming most propulsion comes from my hands, not my feet. Once you can tread water with just your arms you'll have plenty of time to figure out how to swim with your feet without having to worry about sinking.
I noticed that too. The last try was the kid try to grab the ring in a hurry, but the ring is too big to grab he actually pushed it away. Seem to be really dangerous.
Many of these samples are also in a wave pool. And crowded. I assume with all of the above, drowning risk is much higher in these pools.
It's a shame that swimming/water survival aren't a part of school in the US. Knowing how to tread water and doggy paddle are valuable, life-saving skills.
It's partially because if you can teach them those skills you can probably also teach them to swim full stop. A big difficulty with that is most schools would also have to travel to get access to a pool. I've only gone to one school before college that had a pool and it was a charter school on a local college campus so they had access to that pool, some schools might have to travel 30m-1h to get to a pool if they're in a rural area.
When I was a kid in the 70's in rural California, we were bussed almost an hour to a bigger school for mandatory swimming lessons. I don't remember at what age but it was elementary school, I think maybe 5th-6th grade. Several grades were grouped together.
Most (all?) of us could already "swim" basically, since there were lakes and rivers near the small towns and kids usually got free swimming lessons around age 5. The bigger lessons were about the various (then) standard strokes, pool safety and basic lifesaving, how not to accidentally kill yourself on a diving board, swimming laps instead of just swimming around, etc.
I absolutely hated it (too many strangers, why didn't we have our own pool, my endurance was crappy, I was afraid of the deep) -- but I'm glad they made us do it instead of letting us wimp out.
I think it's something schools should do but the logistics of doing it is difficult. You don't want to do it for a whole gym class and you want more instructors available than schools have staff to provide so they have to work with some other group to get enough people to work individually with the kids.
There is of course education that can help in a lot of these situations. What amazes me is that there is no one around these kids to look for them apart from the pool staff.
Most pools here allow for non/bad swimmers to go where they want, with what they...under the absolute condition to have a good swimmer with them, all the time.
A small kid straying alone in the pool is already an alert and the pool staff will get the kid out of the water on the spot, with no reentry. Here the kids are big enough that they could be swimming by themselves, so for me the blame is on the parents for not being there, even if it was for just a minute.
Most Wave pools are at resorts/water parks which typically do not necessarily even employ fully trained/high skill lifeguards.
They often rely on private certification programs that will train "shallow water lifeguards" who do not have to have a full set of swimming & rescue skills. They do tend to have good training for spinal injuries though.
Add in that these resorts are most attractive to non-swimmers and they are hopelessly crowded and it is a dangerous mix.
Places like Great Wolf Lodge scare the daylights out of me as a former lifeguard/WSI.
In most pools you shouldn't even be allowed in this wave pool unless you can pass a basic swim test. Most of the time that's a given with a kid under 12, but it is not entirely obvious (from the videos) how old the drowners are.
My kids wear type III PFD's until they pass their level 3 swim class. If I am swimming actively with them in close proximity they may go without. If I'm on the shore/side of the pool though, they have their PFD on. Armbands and toy flotation rings are not safety devices. Although me and my family love the water in all forms, going to the pool, lake or ocean is always a little stressful for me. I cannot have a thoughtful discussion with someone while my kids are swimming as my head is always on a swivel and my attention is 95% on the water. I will call my kids in periodically so I can take a break from the constant attention required. We do most of our swimming at lakes and ponds. At the pool, I will allow myself a little less focus since there are lifeguards. Fortunately I only have one left that needs to pass her level 3's.
Rates of drowning in Europe[0][1] vary by more than an order of magnitude. I'd be curious about compulsory swimming lessons in schools, as is done here in Switzerland[2], and its correlation to the rate of drowning.
Netherlands reporting in: swimming lessons are spread over three competency group, and as far as I know, nearly all primary schools take time in the curriculum to do at least the first two competency levels before the pupils turn 7 or 8.
Thanks for your answer. I posted my question to the open data stack exchange site[0]. If there isn't an existing dataset, maybe we can create one country by country.
Interesting - that data does not quite match my experience; I was expecting a larger percentage to have B or C level diplomas. I wonder if that is due to region (more water and lakes on the west and north), (ethnic) background or something else.
A lot of primary schools don't do swimming lessons anymore. Fortunately nearly all Dutch kids get swimming lessons at a pool, generally before they'd get them at school anyway. Though that can cause problems for the one immigrant kid that doesn't have a diploma. There have been at least two drownings during school swimming lessons in recent years.
That might depend on the region. Here (Leiden) it is not common for schools to offer swimming lessons. The vast vast majority (I have no numbers, but I would expect it to be close to 100%) of children do take swimming lessons from age 4. Most of them until they reach the third (C) exam, which tends to take about 1.5 years.
Interestingly, Iceland has compulsory swimming lessons (not to mention, pools are part of the national identity). But, their drowning rate is relatively high, based on the first link. Of course, they also have a fair number of tourist drownings on their beaches - I don't know if there are enough of those to skew results.
To all parents out there, it takes 10 seconds for a toddler to drown. Once in the water, if they go under, they tend to get disoriented and don't know where is up or down.
When you are with your kids near a swimming pool or the sea, keep your eyes glued on them.
My rule is "never break line of sight" (I borrowed the term from Assassin's Creed where if you break line of sights from the guards chasing you for a few seconds, their aggro switches off).
Line of sight. When near water opt in for a nice podcast/audio book and keep your eyes on your kids. A lifeguard is scanning the scene but on a 50 kids, you are most likely to spot something like this faster/sooner. Also while looking at your kids, you automatically scan/cover an area of 10-15sqm.
I can only strongly confirm this: last summer, my 2.5 years old boy fell in a (private) swimming pool while playing around it. Of the 4 adults that were around the pool (less than 3 meters away), only one saw him and could get him back safely. We could not hear a single noise, no cries, no water splashes...
Although he was wearing those kids armbands, they were useless as they were keeping his head underwater (he fell head first).
The whole thing took less than 5 seconds, but it was really frightening in retrospect.
Happened with me once and my kid was 8 or 9 already. 10 seconds not looking and he was already drowning on the deep part of the pool (where he was told not to go).
If you are trying to keep the line of sight, never ever use a smartphone. Based from my own experience, it can easily completely distract you for 10-20 seconds or longer. Especially if you think you are "just" doing a quick thing. Then there is a notification dragging you off or something else.
In my experience, <4 years, you hold them if the water is more than a few inches deep; 5-6 years, you're within 2 meters and paying attention to them; once they've got their first swimming diploma, you need to be near the pool; after their second, they can swim on their own, even they're under 10.
As a young adult, I almost drowned in a bathtub when taking magic mushrooms for the first time (a very small dosage of ~1/6th of a full dosage). I did put less water in the tub, but I still fell asleep, and when I woke up, the water line was a few mm from my nose openings. Do not use such drugs without a babysitter!
Line of Sight (LoS / LOS) is indeed an aspect in some video games [1], including World of Warcraft.
I'm going to swim with my 2 year old daughter for the first time this Saturday, so this being linked on HN was a chilling reminder. What I'm mostly scared about is that she gets some kind of temper tantrum whilst being in the water.
A 5-ish year old walking around and splashing at the beach. In shallow below-knee water. With shallow above-knee surf. No worries.
Gets knocked down. Repeated wave impacts, unstable sand, water hitting face, struggle to breathe air and not water. They're unable to stand up again. Keep trying and falling. And then not trying.
The parent was a couple meters away, watching, interpreting this as play. Bystanders stepped in. Intervention was trivially easy. Parent criticized kid for fooling around. So even afterwards, it was non-obvious they had been watching their kid drown.
Perhaps if you don't have experience where the challenge to breathing isn't absence of air, but the presence of too much water mixed into it?
I could spot a few - but was faster than the lifeguard only once. (Well, before they came into view, considering the time it took before they came into view I was probably slower).
It'd be a lot harder in real life, when you don't know if there's going to be a drowning kid.. being prepared is half the game.
It's easier in real life because nobody just jumps in the deep end and starts drowning. When you're doing nothing but watching the pool you notice who is and isn't a strong swimmer and focus your attention on the kids who look like they're a higher risk. Also when you do it all day you get good. Most people who are struggling will know it and make it to the side of the pool with no issues so you get a lot of experience identifying what "not drowning but might soon" looks like.
Eh, anecdotally, I almost drowned when I was a kid before I learned to swim by literally jumping in too deep water. This was in the ocean and not a pool, but I walked out on the bridge to the first division and jumped in because I knew that it was shallow enough there for me to stand on the bottom with my head over the water.
Except it was at highwater now, so my head ended up I'd say almost a foot under water. I landed on the bottom and managed to contain my panic enough to kick off and angle myself so I'd go towards shore and not away from it. In the end I was fine, but a lifeguard watching me would've been caught totally unawares.
Or you're incorrectly trained. You should always be able to flip and float on your back if push comes to shove, and in that position you can swim just using your arms.
"incorrectly trained" is what people typically mean when they say "not a strong swimmer". anyone who has swum alongside 10 year olds on swim teams will understand that you can swim quite strongly even without being "strong" in the muscular sense.
Exactly it isn't physical strength. A strong swimmer is someone who removes "drowning" from the list of options as long as they remain conscious. This is a critical point when boating - friends have asked why I always wear a lifejacket when on a small boat; as a strong swimmer surely I have no need of one. In a boating accident the "conscious" part isn't guaranteed. Get hit by the boom and go overboard and you are going to need that lifejacket.
Floating on your back is only possible for a subset of the population. There are plenty of people who simply sink when on their back, and must kick or more their arms constantly to stay afloat. FWIW
This is improper training. (Former WSI here) Especially in the ocean. The Salinity in the ocean makes it very easy for a well trained swimmer to float. People who sink on their back haven't been trained to maintain enough air in their lungs and/or use minimal arm/leg effort to assist. Also they are probably not leaning their head back far enough. (Head position being a massive component of the problem for non-swimmers.)
Anyone who is a "swimmer" can float prone or supine with minimal effort and work out a foot or stomach cramp. I couldn't even count the # of times I've had foot cramps while swimming and stopped and floated and massaged the cramp out. Floating prone is always the better solution for working out a cramp.
I taught adults in private lessons who had this "problem". It goes away with training.
And at Scout Camp each year we always had some. It doesn't go away with training. Whether its body fat or lung capacity, whatever, they simply sink to the bottom no matter how big a breath they take or the 'head position' explanation. They can be 'swimmer' and still not be physically capable of floating on their back.
When I was a kid I would sink with a full breath of air (in a pool). I learned the back float and the dead man's float in swim lessons but I still needed to move some water with my hands to stay on the surface. I enjoyed the fact that swimming in the ocean was easier since I didn't have to exert myself at all to float.
Nowadays my BMI is such that I float in all bodies of water ;)
There are always people who fail at swim lessons just like anything else, it's more that.
It's a tough problem to solve. I have no more than 10% body fat, I have no issues.
But I also taught adults who were similarly low body fat and some I succeeded in teaching and some I did not.
Consciously controlling your breathing is a big deal in many aspects of swimming & diving. It has a major effect on buoyancy. You can't breathe normally/unconsciously swimming/floating. It is always controlled. Likewise you must keep breathing when diving with compressed air.
Again, no. These kids don't fail at swimming. Unless somebody like you autocratically says "You can't float on your back! You fail!" They're mastering all the strokes, diving to the bottom and retrieving weights, training for the mile swim. They just don't float like you do.
I was talking to a friend, and mentioned it's probably a good idea not to have a swimming pool, because it's one of the top ways kids die accidentally.
However she said kids don't usually die in their pool, they die in their grandparents pool.
As someone who grew up with a pool, it made sure that everyone in my immediate family was well trained on how to swim. It's usually guests that visit who have the biggest risk of drowning in your pool.
Why are there so many people in the deep end of the pool who don't know how to swim properly? Looking at some of the videos, it seems like the majority can't do a breaststroke and drowns if they can't dog paddle to anything buoyant within a few seconds.
Because public pools can't administer a swimming competency test to every one who shows up to swim and people underestimate just how bad they are and how quickly they go from fine to fucked.
Things like this give me so much respect for lifeguards, especially ocean lifeguards.
Being a lifeguard in a pool is clearly tough enough; being in charge of a stretch of sand with people moving in and out constantly has to be absolutely insane. Especially since a kid could run in, get smashed by a wave, and be underwater in the time you spent glancing down the beach the other way.
When I was about 10 I got stuck in the ocean once at a beach. Even without big waves I kept getting pulled further from shore and wasn't strong enough to break past the current despite being a decent swimmer (enough to pass various tests and get certified for some level of swimming from a local camp).
I still have flashes of memories of looking back at the shore and it being quite far but not abnormally far. I just remember treading water for a pretty long time and having to signal the lifeguards with my arms. I'm happy they came eventually.
In beaches, I think often lifeguards rely upon being summoned and being able to get there quickly (beach vehicles). That's in case s/he has to cover kilometers of sand. Of course in such cases a lifeguard can't help with the Instictive Drowning Response: as the article points out, if you're affected by IDR you can hold out only 20-60 seconds.
Those are often places that aren't really fully staffed.
If the place is fully staffed and well managed the beach vehicles shouldn't be needed cause the lifeguards should be close enough to not need them. Most places I've seen ATVs in use the ATVs were being used by volunteers who were not lifeguards but watch the beach and call the coast guard/lifeguards on the phone if there is an emergency. The main beach I see this at is ultra dangerous with cold water, dangerous undertows, thousands of harbor seals in the water, and now has occasional great white sharks hunting the seals!
Making a beach safe enough requires a lot of well trained lifeguards. Not many beaches are ever staffed like that.
If it's dangerous enough some of the guards might need to be in the water on personal watercraft. Usually I've only seen this in super dangerous surfing locations though.
A full lifeguard training program also typically contains training on using a rescue board which is basically like a surfboard and can be super useful in ocean surf.
Baywatch was always super funny.. they carried Rescue Buoys which were near obsolete in favor of Rescue Tubes by the 90s. (The rescue tube is flexible and can be clipped into a circle once you reach the victim.) But the scenes on Baywatch would have realistically often have been done with both a rescue buoy + a rescue board.
Ocean surf is super dangerous, water temps can be dangerous at the ocean. Then in some places you've got sharks, jellyfish, coral reefs.
It's super intimidating compared to working a pool.
I was able to consistently identify the drowning child faster than the lifeguard fairly easily, but it did require a significant amount of concentration (I'm sure it helped that I knew that I was supposed to look for someone in trouble). I'm not sure if I could pay that much attention for a long period of time…
This is brilliant and one of those things that should be in all schools etc as it is an education in observation awareness that holds well in many walks of life.
I speak as somebody who trained to be a lifeguard in the UK - taking the bronze medallion #1 and whilst in intensive and in depth (having to know the four chambers of the heart as well as full CPR...) course with lots of practical exam parts, awareness that this gives you is something you can not learn from books and is hard to roleplay.
How come no one has commented on the fact that most of these videos include someone falling off an inflatable ring in the "deep end" of the pool while having virtually no swimming skills. It seems like a no-brainer to me that it's a bad idea to float out on a ring if you can't swim. Is that really common?
While there are many machine learning-based drowning detection systems out there, I'm having a hard time finding solid information comparing their reaction time and accuracy rates to lifeguards. Does anyone have any solid research that they've found?
I don't want to replace lifeguards or increase their workload by spreading them thinner, but want to find out if we complement them together whether or not it would increase detection rates and lives saved. However, if the current state of the art performs abysmally compared to lifeguards, then I have doubt whether or not they can be combined for improved outcomes.
There seems to be two broad categories of products: those for pools and those for beaches.
Here's a shortlist of systems for pools:
Coral Manta, SwimEye, Mobotix, Axis, AngelEye, Argusmatik, Poseidon, Zwembadcamera, Optoswim, Dipsee A.I., and Lynxight Deep Vision.
For beaches there's:
Milestone, Coastalcoms, etc., and two of the above companies also do beaches:
Dipsee A. I., and Lynxight Deep Vision.
How are things related to swimming education in different countries? In the Netherlands swimming lessons are a pretty basic parental 'requirement'. Former decades had school swimming, but that fell out of grace due to costs and liability issues. I've been taking my sons for lessons for what feels like ages already (about 1.5 years weekly, now twice a week, with about max. a year to go). At that point they are pretty good swimmers, even fully clothed including jackets and it's my responsibility to keep practicing. How is that internationally? It feels quite irresponsible to take children without training to swimming pools, but that might my local customs focus. Swimming is a hard technique to master though.
For those not deeply familiar with U.S. structural issues regarding race, a random viewing of the video will show the unfortunately, the victim/rescued person is likely to be African-American. The reasons for this are complex and sad.
Anecdotally, as a child, my family wasn't well off (and at least once homeless), and for a while lived in a lower class urban neighborhood that just happened to have a nice public pool. However, I know that my swimming education started as a toddler with my mother taking me to the local recreation center for early swim classes. Later when I was maybe 6 or 7 my older brother, a champion high school swimmer, further reinforced this until I was very comfortable in the water and had no problems even at the bottom of the deepest parts of the pool. All through my early, middle and high school years I had countless opportunities to swim, and to learn new skills around water. When I was 17 I could easily complete a mile-long endurance swim, or pull a bucket of rocks 20 feet up off the bottom of a pitch black lake.
My African-American friends, starting way back at that housing complex, had no such similar experience. I remember long summer days with my friends teaching our black friends to swim so we could have more fun in the pool as a group. As children, it wasn't entirely unusual that one of us kids couldn't swim, as maybe their parents just hadn't gotten around to teaching them, so we took it upon ourselves -- never really noticing the pattern that only our black friends hadn't learned to swim yet. What we didn't understand is that most of their parents would never teach them, as many of them in fact couldn't swim either or discouraged it for various reasons -- creating a generational problem.
Now, older, I've come to see and understand the sadness of the situation and hope it continues to be addressed in a more systematic way.
Please, if you can't swim, learn to. Teach your children or have your children taught. Water sports are tons of fun, but your safety is mostly on your ability to swim.
This is a great response. When I was a Water Safety Instructor I spent part of my time teaching at a special inner city program that was designed to try and counteract the disadvantages you are discussing.
Another place I worked was in a very privileged town at a very large country club. They did a lot of corporate events where the pool was hired out by a company for their party. We would never get through corporate events without multiple rescues if the company had a lot of employees who lived in the city without access to pools & swim lessons.
I was wondering why the one in danger was always black child, in every video I watched! I never thought that this could be the reason, but your comment is indeed insightful, thanks
I almost drowned when I was pretty young (I wanna say 6 years old) might be older though but not by much, when we went on a pool trip when I was in day care or something, can’t really remember what grade you’re in at age six. I went to a deeper end and wasn’t able to grab the edge to pull myself up.
A girl a few years older than I was was able to swim across and push me up. I remember there were two “chaperones” who were just a few feet away from the edge of the pool but they were both facing away.
Terrifying experience, still remember it vividly. Parents kind of laughed it off but I definitely could have died. Definitely teach your kids to swim properly before letting them go to a pool unsupervised is all I’ll say.
Something in the embed code prevents the "allow full screen" from working properly, so the video is tiny and scrunched up into the upper left hand corner. When I watched this on YouTube, with full screen enabled, I spotted the poor little fellow within about 5 seconds. This is using the latest chrome (v80.0.3987.132)
The reason for this, I think, is that the idea is that you click on the drowning person when you see it. They're probably assuming dimensions in able to correlate your click with their actual position.
The first one I got was #26 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuAfTA2wf7o) and I find it quite hard to detect. Just next to the drowning child, there are a few others splashing around, which looks nearly identical. Could a machine make the distinction reliably?
Also interesting to note that there are many people really close by who do not notice the drowning, but spring into action to help once the lifeguard jumped.
The things that gave it away for me are the head being really close to the waterline and desperate-looking, rapid flapping by the arms to try to stay above the water. Disclaimer: not a lifeguard, this might not actually be valid.
Oh, I thought they were going to use me as a mechanical turk to train an AI...seems like a good idea...could have camera-based lifeguards that dispatch lil' float rescue drones.
A healthy respect for pools is an excellent idea. There are few activities a child might reasonably engage in where it could go so wrong it might end up in their death. Swimming is one.
This seems like the perfect exercise for computer vision and machine learning/AI to rapidly alert the lifeguard to the drowning child or deploy some sort of scuba robot flotation device that can get to the drowning person before a lifeguard to shave off precious second that can cause brain damage from deoxygenation.
A flotation device isn't enough, often a drowning person doesn't have enough awareness or body control to grab it. You need someone who can grab the victim and pull them out of the water.
I believe this is where tech can be used as a tool to alert the lifeguards. I am seriously exploring building a real time video monitoring tool to alert potential drowning risks. I have the tech chops (video processing + image detection) and would be happy to collaborate if someone wants to join.
I once told a Life Guard at a public water park that his job is hard, that I can't even keep track of my own kids let alone all of them. He laughed at me. I still think its a lot of responsibility and hard to track everyone.
After a couple of videos I quickly trained my eye to notice specific splash patterns peripherally and was able to spot it immediately in the rest of the videos.
Seems like it would make an interesting CV/ML project
In the videos from the "article", the pool guard jumped in while the person is still trying to get above the water. They never lose consciousness and get away with a scare.
This system is "trained to detect people under-water" and in the demo it only starts beeping after about 6 seconds of no movement while the person is on the bottom of the pool. So the person first has to get exhausted, sink, stop moving, and then the system catches on that something is wrong. I guess if you get oxygen into the person fast enough, they can make a full recovery, but in the context of a pool this should not replace lifeguards. At home, this is better than nothing, though I wonder if actual (near-)drownings would go up or down because of the sense of security.
Edit: the About page confirms it:
> Without air in your lungs, your body sinks [...] For children, irreversible damage to the brain tissues typically starts to occur after about 4-5 minutes without oxygen, (for adults it is after about 3-4 minutes). $product detects when a person sinks, meaning seconds after she or he stopped breathing
Detecting people that have gotten lungs full of water and are unconscious at the bottom of a pool is better than not detecting that, but it doesn't sound like pool guard or proper parenting can be replaced just yet, even if it might be a helpful last-resort aid.
So tragic. In college a group of friends were at the beach when one of them started drowning. Everyone thought he was fooling around, but by the time they realized the truth it was too late.
I'm a ML researcher: if you have video data/footage for this "spot the drowning child", I'd be interested in helping build a ML system for detecting this.
This was really really informative. I realized my eyes were totally looking for the wrong thing, and also spent too much time looking at swimmers who were swimming under water..
Yep. For anyone curious: "Diploma A" can be started at age 4. The requirements to finish the exam are:
- Swimming with clothes on after an unexpected fall into the water, able to orient themselves above water and leave the water independently.
- Enter the water in different ways, can orient themselves and proceed to swim through something.
- Can use one or more of the 4 basic strokes (breaststroke, single backstroke, front crawl, back crawl) to swim a base distance
- Can float on his back and stomach. Feels confident in the water.
- Can do water steps(?) with arms and legs, can turn and orient themselves.
The clothing required are:
- Bath clothes
- Shirt/Crew neck with long sleeves
- Long pants, dress or skirt (reaches the ankle)
- Shoes (plastic/leather/sports)
In addition to what I saw in the videos, it could be interesting to learn how to spot the drowning person because it went unconscious or because of a cramp, etc.
Why? Typically you age an article to contextualize it (sometimes REALLY important). In this case it is an interactive educational tool, the age hasn't changed its purpose, value, or usage.
What's the point of this? Should I be surprised that I do a poor job at watching a camera footage compared to a person being present there with all sensory inputs, context, trained to spot drowning people?
It shows what actually drowning looks like which is quiet and very predictable movements that don't match how most people expect it to look from movies/tv.
Despite their popularity, swimming experts advise against using inflatable armbands. Although they can help a child to float, they can slip off and lead to drowning. Inflatable armbands do not prevent drowning, nor are they a life-saving device. Mistaking them for one can create a dangerous false sense of security. Additionally, inflatable armbands teach children to float in a vertical position, which is incorrect because swimming is usually done in a prone position. Children who wear armbands can become dependent on them, as well.
They're a temporary measure; they make sure that a child that goes under, quickly comes up again. But a parent still needs to be nearby and paying attention. Never let a child without swimming diploma swim without nearby supervision. (This should be blindingly obvious.)
Of course once they start swimming lessons, they practice without armbands.
In other words, if the small child supposedly needs armbands, they shouldn't be in the pool at all because the inflatables can easily slip off the arms.
They can be in the pool, but the parent needs to be in the pool with them. There's no substitute for direct adult supervision, or swimming lessons, of course.
I'm not advocating armbands during swimming lessons; there's a good reason they don't use them there. But when just playing around, they are incredibly useful, and keep the kid's head above water.
As a lifeguard, I'm going to have to disagree with you. Arm-floats are blatantly dangerous, and should never be used. If they don't fit exactly the way the manufacturer planned, they run the risk of pinning a kid's face in the water, and even under ideal conditions provide minimal safety while providing a false perception of safety.
The only buoancy aids that should ever be worn are Coast Guard approved PFDs. Anything else does more harm than good.
Wet suits and life jackets are much better options for kids than arm bands. Heck, in many places arm bands are banned completely. I think cost is one of the few reason why arm bands are still used, and perhaps that they are marginally better than not having any in some cases.
You can get a great used wet suits for next to nothing, and in many cases the swimming pools have life jacket loaners. A life jacket with safety straps (between legs) are super cheap, and they are adjustable for better fit. Snug fit means they're less in the way. And they're harder to remove.
Admittedly it’s been a while since I’ve been to a public pool, and only ever in the US, but there was never any such requirement. I mean even if they did ask “can you swim?” that doesn’t really mean much, it’s not like there’s an official certification process... and either way, doesn’t mean they can’t still drown, so the lesson is relevant anyway.
In every public pool I've been in the US they had a "shallow end" and "deep end". In the shallow water kids could easily touch the bottom and didn't need to know how to swim. The lifeguard between the shallow and deep end wouldn't let you in if you couldn't prove you could swim. It was always cross the line and the lifeguard would yell at your to swim across the pool (different pools had different tests), if you weren't strong enough you got sent back to the shallow end.
If there wasn't a lifeguard the above obviously didn't apply.
European pools generally ask under children under 14 or so who go swimming unattended whether they have swimming diplomas.
If you complete your swimming diplomas, you get stickers for your swim shorts to show you have completed them.
Generally certain rides in water parks, like fast slides or streams will require you to have higher levels of swimming training to go on if you're under 14.
I remember I was asked a bunch of times if I had my "free swimmer" (Freischwimmer, Bronze)[1] by lifeguards when I was pre-teen in Germany, indeed. Tho, that wasn't something they did every time, more like spot checks.
My parents were wise enough to enroll me in a course so I got my "early swimmer" (seahorse, Seepferdchen) training by age 6; that doesn't make you into a good swimmer yet, but at least you know the basics. Then elementary school took over and I got up to the gold diploma by age 10.
By age 8 or so I already was a far better swimmer than my parents, who never had any formal training.
I remember my mom once refusing to take one of my friends with us swimming when I was like 8 or 9 because he didn't have any swimming diplomas yet (he had only come to Germany from Tunisia like a year prior and was in the process of catching up with swimming ed). I remember I was mad at the time, but in hindsight it was absolutely the right decision.
Still, we all knew stories of kids relatively close to us drowning; for me it was the little brother of a friend of my sisters who drowned when he went to a water park as part of a kids birthday. The "usual" had happened: the two parents of the birthday kid being too overwhelmed by 10 or so loud kids amped up on candy and not trained lifeguards anyway, not enough lifeguards, wave pool... the adults didn't even notice they had lost track of this one kid until they saw the lifeguard pulling him out of the water, too late, or so the story went.
Swimming education in Germany is highly standardized. The "Bundesverband zur Förderung der Schwimmausbildung" (federal association in furtherance of swimming education) consists of different lifesaving and sports organizations and has recently published new examination regulations which highered the standards for swimming badges.
All swimmming instructors in those organizations will tell you that you should permanently keep an eye on your kids and don't let them go to the pool alone until they complete the bronze badge which requires you to swim for fifteen minutes, dive down to two meters and jump into the water. Only after you complete this test you are considered a "safe swimmer".
I live in Europe and while we did have some kind of stickers for attending swimming school, I don't think those were something that you'd actual have on you.
For me and my buddys in school it was quite a thing of "pride" to have the better diploma's (there was a beginner one + bronze to gold)
(this was around 2004)
I remember having the presence of mind to yell out help before blanking out. My closest friend in the troop luckily turned around, swam back to and drug me back to shore.
I was scared of the water after that, but some how ended up fighting my fear and earning the swimming merit badge, which for a weak swimmer, was no easy task.
For his heroism, and because I had overcome my near death experience, we were both recognized for embodying different aspects of scouting.
That incident in the lake inspired my friend to go on to become a life-guard.
Both my kids started swim lessons in infancy, and my oldest son gets compliments for his swimming skills while at the public pool. Though the pool we use has life guards, I never for a second take my eyes of my kids.
Maybe one day they'll go on to be life guards prior to college.