Spot the Drowning Child (2015)
spotthedrowningchild.com
spotthedrowningchild.com
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.
Never take your eyes off your kids.
Stories of parents turning the back for a split second, only to see their kid missing is the norm.
A scary moment like that reaffirms what you said--it's too easy for something terrible to happen. I've experienced it too, just not in a pool.
I'm glad your child is safe.
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.
Turns out our mandatory swimming lessons from the age of 8 weren't as useless as I thought.
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.
If the ocean isn't too rough, and you conserve your energy for dealing with waves, this works pretty well.
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?
These 2 things are the difference for me between sinking & floating. Mostly tilting my head further back though.
Of course this fails miserably with even the smallest waves.
Decomposition produces a variety of gases that increase buoyancy.
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.
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.
Something I learned as part of the swimming merit badge :)
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.
I never did learn CPR. Maybe this is the year.
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.
this is probably a good example of why this system exists.
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.
I don’t plan on ever trying that again!
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 am amazed at how few of my early millennial peers have never heard of the elementary backstroke.
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.
I don't think I was ever taught it. I think I just discovered it playing around in the water one day.
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.
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.
Likely, it was never standard think to teach.
I suspect that it was never taught for competition, partly because of its energy efficiency through low performance.
I also wonder if it's more common around lakes and oceans; as it's great for going over waves with minimum energy.
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.
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.
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.
Both events are very rare. They make up only 1%-2% of all drownings, says pediatrician James Orlowski, MD, of Florida Hospital Tampa. [1]
[1] https://www.webmd.com/children/features/secondary-drowning-d...
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.
0.99^n = (1-0.9)
n*log(0.99) = log(0.1)
n = log(0.1)/log(0.99) = ~229
"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. """
(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")
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.
Also we don't know how many near-drownings vs drownings there are. Lot of good statistical quiz questions in here.
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.
It's a misleading term ...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JunglesSoundLike...
But overall their message was the same, post drowning, go to hospital.
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.
And drowning is like most things.
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 list goes on and on and on ...
Pretty sure "cheating" and infidelity are largely human concepts. That's normal and natural behaviour for many species.
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.
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?
Yes. Obviously. And whether or not the exploitation is "programmed" is irrelevant. After all everything is programmed.
I have no idea where I'm going with this, but that phrasing still seems off to me.
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.
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.
That's exactly what the OP said.
Not to one-up you, but anyone who's at it anyway, also look up the platypus mating behavior. Spoiler: it involves 4-headed penises.
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.
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.
https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/recreation/swimming-spl... (see "Important Information")
The presence of children with no swimming ability in the deep end of a crowded pool in this video seems like an obvious recipe for disaster.
edit: toys and floats are allowed in Toronto public pools, the kids have quite a lot of fun with them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/Gka9TFwqoVs?t=60 https://youtu.be/FTtHOZfV_qA?t=47 https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/drowning-detection-sy... https://swimeye.com/
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.
Also helps that in this instance, most have rubber rings and if you see an empty rubber ring, that in itself would trigger concerns and focus.
(Which is also why the lifeguards here are told to approach from the side, less likely to be grabbed on the head that way.)
> 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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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.
It'd be a tool that can warn the lifeguards in the event that they didn't notice the drowning, not the only thing that monitors the pool.
Even the camera manufacturer wouldn't be immune from defending themselves.
Welcome to America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Climbing trees (fall risk)
Climbing tall playground equipment (I broke my arm falling from a height of just 3 feet once, on one of those). Broken neck, etc.
Playing in the street (cars)
Bicycling (can get hit by a car, sigh)
Trampoline (don't get me started)
Exploring (falling down deep wells, etc.)
The Gashlycrumb Tinies is not just a morbid story about impossible deaths. Living is dangerous, living young possibly especially so!
I had a pyromaniac phase. Once set a field on fire. Things could have gone extremely worse.
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.
There are unfortunately many many ways for kids to die.
Just because multiple things are possible doesn't mean they are equally probable.
- various kitchentools, knives, fork
- other tools, axe, hammer
- (poison) cleaning stuff
- climbing on the tish and falling on their neck
- ...
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.
In the large majority of motor vehicle incidents the child is an occupant of the vehicle : https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Unintentional Poisoning seems really common for adults?! Misuse of prescription drugs apparently.
10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group HighlightingUnintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2011
2007 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/unintentional_2007_bw...
2008 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...
2009 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...
2010 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10lcid_unintentional_...
2011 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...
All Data - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html
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.
5-9: Unintentional Drowning 128
Unintentional Fire/Burn 81
I would not call that "far outweighs".
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.
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.
I have a fence.
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.
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'.
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.
...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.
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.
An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.
In general, I want people to have full market freedoms, but I put those water wings pretty near lawn darts in terms of danger.
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.
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.
Here's how it can look, and this makes it a bit clearer why it can be a hazard. https://i0.wp.com/renomomsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/0... If it slips down to the wrists like this it's arguably worse than having nothing at all.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
They lack the failure mode of floating face down in water, but instead are unsafe to others who can be hit with them. And kids will collide.
The newer foam ones are much softer and safer.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I've met more than one scuba diver who were weak swimmers but avid divers. To your previous point, flippers turn a weak swimmer into > an olympian.
I did some googling and found these fins designed specifically for pool lap swimming: https://myswimpro.com/blog/2018/03/01/8-benefits-of-swimming...
They're smaller than your traditional "scuba" style fins but probably still WAY more effective than your feet alone.
They look fun! Wow, now I want to swim again. So fun. lol
Experiment! Google! Have fun! Ignore haters! Let go of your negative experiences!
Found the programmer :)
Like most other sports there is a body type that is advantaged in swimming.
- Tall overall height (max speed is limited by length at water line just like boats)
- Lower than usual ratio for torso length to leg length
- Large feet
- Long arms (positive ape index)
- Large hands
Michael Phelps is a perfect example of this.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...
[1] http://78.136.22.110/europe/info/switzerland/switzerland-dro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_lessons#Switzerland
Not being able to swim is viewed as "having a bit of a handicap" that you should fix as soon as possible.
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.
That's an actual law with children in Australia, idk about the rest of the world. <5 years old within arms reach, <10 years old within line of sight.
When you are at a pool / lake / sea with a kid that cannot swim, keep them in arms reach.
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.
Do not break line of sight.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_sight_(video_games)
This can be surprisingly non-obvious.
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?
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.
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.
The ocean is a different matter I'm sure.
Nowadays my BMI is such that I float in all bodies of water ;)
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.
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.
However she said kids don't usually die in their pool, they die in their grandparents pool.
food for thought.
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.
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 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.
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.
#1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Medallion_(United_Kingd...
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.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=machine...
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.
Lifeguarded during high school. It's hard, even in a small pool.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjC2Ucpr__E
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.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=902136...
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.
This worked, though:
<iframe id="player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" title="YouTube video player" width="854" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T5mDQeDkca0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>I kind of assumed that was intentional, since the lifeguard can’t make it full screen or zoom in either. :)
Maybe? There is a
allowfullscreen="1"
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.
OK, what the hell is a kid doing in the deep end who cannot f*ing swim? A large flotation ring is NOT a life preservation device!
Seems like it would make an interesting CV/ML project
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.
Every kid should be taught this.
- 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.
- Bath clothes
- Shirt/Crew neck with long sleeves
- Long pants, dress or skirt (reaches the ankle)
- Shoes (plastic/leather/sports)
Diploma A is the first of the three diplomas (ABC). If you have all of those you meet the national swimming safety standard.
More reading: https://www.allesoverzwemles.nl/nationale-zwemdiplomas/zwem-...
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.
HN regulars strongly prefer a year whenever it's not the current year, and the mods have confirmed that we should do so.
(Sometimes, new things pop up under a title that has been seen before)
Finally I saw the child go down, so I wanted to rewind a few seconds to see what happened there. Nope, not allowed!
The site has an overlay where you can click on the drowning person and find out if you were correct. Hence the other controls are hidden.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.dlrg.de/informieren/ausbildung/schwimmabzeichen [German]
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".
If there wasn't a lifeguard the above obviously didn't apply.
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.
Armbands are dangerous and hinder learning.
The only buoancy aids that should ever be worn are Coast Guard approved PFDs. Anything else does more harm than good.
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.