Good idea. Looking at it first though i was a little confused. The video plays immediately, so i didn't realize it was interactive because i had no time to read the text and no introductory explanation.
It would also help if the video automatically scaled to fill as much of the window as possible. On my screen it was a quarter of the entire screen and everything was really tiny.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm using a position: relative box as a part of the game mechanic for finding the drowner, so your browser's zoom functions should work fine.
Thank you for this and I hate you. I actually teared up a couple of times as the life guards pulled the kids to safety.
I also had some trouble getting the hang of what I was supposed to do. I'd recommend an interstitial to get people going before the video starts. Maybe something like this?
You are about to watch a recorded video of typical activity at a pool. Help the life guard watch all the swimmers in your half of the pool.
If you see someone who needs help from the life guard, click on them in the video and check the results at the bottom of the video.
Since life guards can't do it (as much as they might wish they could!) don't rewind, pause or click the video while being tested unless you would be ready to blow the whistle, jump in, and swim to someone.
I agree. Clicking the video didn't seem to work for me the first time, so I just figured that wasn't how the site worked and wasn't entirely sure why this was a "Show HN" as I assumed it was probably interactive but seemed not. More helpful (and prominent) text than a single line in the bottom without an autoplay video would have helped, as the text there can be out of view/hard to notice.
Thank you for sharing. Just watching the video and getting the explanation alone was enough to make me think. Will definitely be thinking about this next time I take my kid to the pool this summer.
I clicked on the kid as soon as he kicked off from the wall, as he was already panicking while trying to hold on to the rope and it didn't give me points.
The next one in the tidal wave pool I clicked and all it did was pause the video, and when I continued the video the kid was being rescued.
I actually spotted that kid as the first possible point of trouble... but you have to wait until the "moments later" card to see him start doing something risky, and then like you said, even when he's tangled in the rope it won't let you click him.
For that guy I waited until he started actually showing IDR signs - no lateral movement, dipping up and down. Even though he's struggling in the rope he's still managing to move around using a bad freestyle.
That thrashing around doesn't look like he's still managing. That's full on panic. As someone that has been on life guard duty, that would be enough for me to dive in and get him out.
There are a number of videos. Mine was a kid that fell off their float out towards the middle of the top third of the screen and panicked. Refreshing and force refreshing hasn't gotten me a new one (or I'm just getting similar ones and don't notice) but there's ~30 on youtube.
I always assumed my friends who spent their summers lifeguarding had a simple carefree job. I never gave much thought to just how attentive you have to be as a lifeguard. Thanks for putting this into perspective (literally) for the rest of us.
I spent a few years of high school and college working at a summer camp, mostly as a counsellor. There were lots of great things about it, but being down by or in a lake with a group of 7-10 8-14 year olds was terrifying.
I'd spend every minute counting the kids, making sure none of them were missing. At the camp I worked on, you not only had to worry about actual drownings, but also administrators who would try and "steal" a kid about once a week from unobservant counsellors, then call a waterfront drill where all the lifeguards on staff had to search the entire waterfront for a "missing" camper. Until the drill was over, no-one involved (including the counsellor who had lost their kid, lifeguards wearing masks searching under the docks etc.) knew if it was real, or a drill.
In the 5-summers I worked there, I took it as a point of pride that none of my campers were ever stolen, and I never saw another counsellor have their kid successfully stolen more than once. The shame and terror of spending about 5-minutes thinking, "Oh shit, I might have just let a child die" was a pretty effective motivator.
The steal kids drill sounds quite stressful. Is the goal to train to be attentive always and spot the immediate stealing act or to keep you counting and have a proper reaction?
I was a lifeguard, so I can speak with some authority. Both skills are necessary. Not only do you have to count and track swimmers, but you have to keep mental notes about their abilities, be aware of what they're doing, and imagine possible outcomes so you can identify and react quickly to the actual outcomes. If your attention wanders for too long, especially at a busy place, you can easily lose track of someone. If you lose track of the wrong person, well, buckle up.
Fortunately, there are usually multiple lifeguards on duty with you, you're usually on a strict 10- or 15-minute rotation with them, and one of the stations is the break room. That helps a lot.
Lifeguarding at a camp is at least 5 times more difficult than at a pool, and I suspect that's why they ran drills to keep the lifeguards on their toes. Underwater visibility is usually next to nothing. The lake is usually full of teenage boys. Access to the water is effectively unlimited. There are often a lot of occluders, such as boats and bushy shores.
Having had a similar experience (lifeguard/counselor), I never worried much about the kids at the lake. They had PFDs, they'll float. Swim tests were always my nightmare.
That said, my bosses weren't huge assholes and didn't disappear kids regularly like yours sound like they did. We had drills, but you could tell by the demeanor of the director that it wasn't real.
I thought it was a really good practice, and didn't feel it was assholeish at all. It's not like having your camper stolen was unavoidable. If there's a lapse in your attention long enough that allows someone to walk up to one of your campers, explain to them what's going on and walk away with them, there's a lapse in your attention long enough for your camper to drown. You're signing up for your job with the primary description of, "Keep these kids safe for a week."
Plus, it wasn't a secret. We all knew it was happening. If all the counsellors down by the waterfront were being attentive and they couldn't steal a camper, one of the admins would just come up to a counsellor and ask us to take one of our kids, and tell us to go report a missing camper to the lifeguard in about 5-minutes.
Now as a parent, I'd much rather send my kid to a camp where the counsellors are terrified of losing my kid, than one where they're not.
I think it's a terrible practice, wholly ineffective, and neighboring on pathological to instill terror into your staff at the prospect of losing a child.
There are many better, more effective ways to ensure you're not going to lose a kid. We did things like count children before/after each activity, run drills at regular (not weekly) intervals, etc.
We also had games where kids were left to run in the forest for multiple hours unaccompanied (variations on capture the flag). The kids loved it, your kid would love it, and the counselors in charge of your kid wouldn't be obsessively paranoid about the exact location of your child at every single moment because that level of attention just isn't necessary.
> I think it's a terrible practice, wholly ineffective, and neighboring on pathological to instill terror into your staff
The point of drills that simulate reality effectively is to get you comfortable enough with taking the necessary actions at the required times that you will not have terror instilled in you. This is why armies around the world all do 'live fire' exeercise and so on, and why companies run BAU or DR failover tests.
Ha! Yeah, we got the kid back. They'd spend the drill hidden in the admin office, eating ice cream.
Really the most worrying part of the whole thing was teaching the stolen kids that if an adult walks up to them and tells them to quietly sneak away, they get ice cream.
Was a waterpark lifeguard during highschool. We went through training every Tuesday night and were all CPR certified. It's a far cry from the lifeguards you see sitting around at neighborhood pools. If I was at the wave pool, I could easily be responsible for watching hundreds of people at any given time both in the water and in my immediate vicinity of the deck (choking? heat stroke?)
The job was sometimes so intense I'd wake up in the middle of the night in a panic because I thought I had forgotten my whistle or someone was having an emergency. Props to anyone who does it. When executed well and carefully, it's not exceptionally hard work but any lapse of judgement for even a moment can lead to disaster.
> The job was sometimes so intense I'd wake up in the middle of the night in a panic because I thought I had forgotten my whistle or someone was having an emergency.
I had the same waking panics while being a camp counsellor. We'd have 7 day sessions with 3 day breaks in between and quite often those breaks were punctuated with waking up bolt upright to figure out where my kids were. Took a while for that to pass.
Also took a while to remember how to eat slowly (you eat quick, or you don't eat!)
The biggest eye-opener to me was the "Instinctive Drowning Response" article shared a few days ago. So few people notice someone drowning, even when only feet away. I feel it's a bit more obvious when you're further away.
Is this in any way related or inspired by that post?
/Start edit
>Inspired by this hackernews thread: can you notice who's drowning in the pool before the lifeguard does?
Answered my own question by reading the About on the Github. :D
/End edit
This is a great thing to share on Facebook (for those who have it). It's one of the lessons that really sticks with someone, because of how terrifying the reality of drowning really is. So thank you for sharing/making it.
Also for the timer "score", might I suggest clarifying it a bit with "faster/slower than the lifeguard"? I was a bit confused if my time was +0.82s past the lifeguard noticing" or "0.82s faster". I had to 'play' a second time and purposefully click late to figure it out.
I am quite annoyed that I didn't know the signs of drowning, having very young children and having watched water safety videos and taking my children swimming, but no advice on how to spot this. More preventative stuff.
I think it should be made a bigger deal of. Often holiday pools are not guarded and if everyone around knows the signs then someone can be saved.
Knowing is half the battle. The other half is fighting. Spreading awareness would be the fighting part. ;)
Things spread insanely fast on Facebook. If a few parents shared this website and their also-parent friends shared it with their friends it could easily get millions of views within several days. And parents would share this information.
If you think it should be made a bigger deal of - why not make it a bigger deal? Message your school district representatives about swimming education, especially identifying when someone is drowning. Start a funding for a public pool for your town/city, if one doesn't exist, and support the school organizing "field trips" to the public pool to provide such an education.
You'll likely get ignored. So start talking with other parents and make it a large enough issue that it can't be ignored. I don't think many parents would be against their child being taught how to swim, practice pool safety, and learn a life skill that could save someone's life. The main issue is getting them to think about it in the first place.
The hardest part about getting anything done is finding a leader with the drive and ability to get things done. Few people want to step up and even fewer of those that are willing are capable.
I watched a few of the rescues, and they were all of kids falling out of their floaties and seemingly unable to swim at all. What does it look like when an able swimmer encounters trouble? Would it look the same as the drowning response kicks in?
Also, how do you differentiate the drowning response from someone that's just bad at treading water and floats low in the water? They might both be bobbing just in and out of the water, but one of them can just transition to floating on their back and the other is trying to not drown. (I haven't swam in forever and don't know if I can even swim anymore, but I was reminded of childhood swimming lesson tests.)
If you can find a video of this scenario on youtube please let me know. I found this series of wavepool videos on the HN thread posted a few days ago (thanks oska!)
The one I saw was a kid who had some swimming ability that fell out of a tube. He swam a poor crawl, without putting his head in the water for about 4-5s before going under.
I spent three summers life guarding at a US state park and would like to give my personal experiences, even if it doesn't give a definitive answer to your question.
Always trust yourself. Any suspicion on your part is more than enough reason to go help. These guards have excellent reactions and don't try to make a judgement call between distress and drowning. While new to the job, I hesitated trying to verify patrons needed a rescue instead of going in immediately.
While this is anecdotal, I also found that poor treaders often made attempts to move to more secure depths. Struggling is no fun, and most people swim to have fun. The dangerous cases were people who did not know their swimming ability chasing family into the deep end.
Lastly we didn't allow floaties in the water, and I think everyone who sees this video should notice the trend and think twice about them.
> Also, how do you differentiate the drowning response from someone that's just bad at treading water and floats low in the water?
Watch the face, arms and legs, and water surface. A swimmer in distress has his mouth as high as possible, may be flailing a little with his arms, barely kicks (if at all), barely disturbs the surface of the water, and goes under repeatedly.
But as a lifeguard, I helped weak swimmers, and then requested very firmly that they stay in shallow water. I also took their names so I could get their attention quickly if they wandered too close to the deep end.
When an adult or adolescent drowns, it looks exactly the same, they're much more dangerous to would-be helpers, and half the time they're drunk and surrounded by drunk people.
I wonder what factors into the differences. I'm sure things like number of guarded facilities, number of swimmers and amount of swim classes are important, it's the specific differences that would be interesting.
If you go year by year it looks like the rate goes up from 17-20, then after 21 starts to decrease. Somewhere else on the CDC's website they say that "alcohol use is involved in up to 70% of deaths associated with water recreation", which seems pretty consistent with that.
I've played water polo for several years. When participating in an activity where it's mandatory to wear a life jacket, I do, but is there really a point?
When I've been required to wear a life jacket in the past (as an adult) it's typically been in a situation where there was a chance of some other sort of injury occurring that would render you unconscious or unable to swim normally.
Depends on the distance. As soon as you are out in a small boat there may be too far to the shore, especially if the water is really cold.
But at least keep the life jacket near you (ie on the boat), that way you can put it on if necessary - and never ever go out unless there is a suitable life jacket for every person on the boat.
Also never wear an inflated life jacket inside a ship (if it sinks and you become trapped you can't escape).
>Many passengers died because they inflated their life jackets in the cabin, causing them to be trapped inside by the rising water. This led to future notices about not inflating the vests before exiting the plane.
But first: another water poloist! Awesome! Water polo was pretty small in my area, so we didn't have a lot of talent in the pool. (Pun intended.) I swam distance on the swim team and was a decent sprinter, so my coach had me play both offensive and defensive hole. My best friend could keep his navel above the water for minutes, so he played keeper behind me. I still love to get my hands on a ball and demo the backwards corner shot. Fun times.
Conscious able swimmers have usually been taught how to lie still and float on their backs, or will figure it out quickly if in calm water. They can often call for help, and will do so, interspersed with periods of rest. (Shouting takes a lot of energy.) If the water is warm, they might have hours to get rescued. If the water is cold or even just lukewarm, how long they have depends on a lot of factors, especially the temperature and whether hypothermia is setting in - but in any case they have a lot less time.
Able swimmers, especially those who are good enough to swim a mile, often underestimate the effects of cold water on the body.
They also tend to underestimate the tremendous strength of moving water. Anybody in moving water who is in distress should be helped ASAP, no matter how good they are at swimming. Moving water is a destroyer and an equalizer.
That leaves us with unconscious swimmers. Nobody swims well while unconscious. :) If there's a chance something could knock you out, whether a boat, an overhanging branch, exposure to cold water, or (for those of extended age) a heart attack, put on a well-fitting life jacket.
I was most impressed by the attentiveness of the life guards. While we know someone is going to start struggling in the next 20-30 seconds they've likely been staring at the pool for several hours. They were still able to spot the victims in a huge pool almost instantly.
I was a lifeguard at a beach. I didn't have any dramatic rescues like the video, but you soon get a feeling of which kids are a little too adventurous and need keeping an eye on.
Your brain soon kicks into holding your breath while watching kids swim, if one is splashing around while you start to feel uncomfortable it's time to wade in and drag them to the surface.
Often for us it was the uneven sea bottom, someone takes a step forward and plunges out of their depth. Run over and hoik them out.
To this day, when the surf is up and I see toddlers paddling I get chills and can't stop watching them. Doesn't take more than an inch of water for them to fall and start rolling out with the backwash.
A few weeks ago I was sitting 6 feet from the edge of a community pool while many parents and their children were swimming. Out of nowhere one of the lifeguards on the opposite end blows her whistle, jumps in and swims frantically across the pool to rescue a drowning boy 3 feet away from his mother. She was literally looking at him and didn't recognize he was drowning.
The mother and child were only about 10 feet from me and even I didn't recognize it, and I was a lifeguard 15 years ago! That experience frightened me more than most because it showed me how bad I and others are at recognizing drowning.
Glad that this exists so more people understand what drowning really looks like.
can't we have something like those fitness bands to be worn by children while in the pool - once a person starts drowning the heartbeat and other lifesigns are changing very characteristically and that can just turn the red light on lifeguards console on.
Unfortunately that type would not work in a pool... they barely work with significant movement, never mind when there's water sloshing in and out between the LEDs / light sensors.
Costwise, I think that would be in the ball-park, if we can figure out what to monitor, and how, it could most likely be manufactured for <$10.
I do work in this field (wireless vital signs monitoring) and unfortunately I don't know of any current technology that I would trust to monitor heart rate on a swimmer other than perhaps a chest strap (but not as a safety device either). For a point of reference, the Apple watch fails to accurately record heart rate when very sweaty or experiencing periodic movement (such as the periodic arm waving).
There was a kickstarter project for a swim safety device (mentioned by others in this thread) but I believe that was based around picking up the arm movement characteristic of this response, which may be a sensible approach (I don't know enough about the characteristic motions of the drowning response vs regular splashing).
just googled more :) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_oximetry - an adapted for waterpool conditions earlobe oximeter is probably what is needed here (with probably a transmitter/amplifier with battery in the wristband). But currently it is in the $100+ territory.
That might be too expensive to hand out to everyone at the pool, but if it were workable for this application it would definitely be in range for something to sell directly to parents.
It wouldn't be able to interface with a device the lifeguard has in this case, but it could surely start making noise and/or flashing in an emergency.
It's not that simple unfortunately. One concern I have is that the oscillatory motion of the drowning response is well within the range of cardiac rates (1-3Hz from the video). Pulse oximetry data is quite noisy and is especially affected by motion affecting the sensing apparatus. Pulse Oximeters employ algorithms to attempt to reject noise (including noise from motion). Unfortunately these algorithms tend to depend on the cyclical nature of the heartbeat signal (using FFT or auto-correlation to latch onto the heartbeat signal, for example). The presence of an oscillatory confounding signal (noise induced from the motion of the drowning subject) would significantly reduce the reliability of these algorithms.
A device for alerting for a drowning subject would be classified as a medical device (in Europe most likely class IIb as it is measuring a vital function in a life support scenario) as the malfunction of the device could fail to prevent the saving of a life. The burden of certification of such a device is understandably high, and one would have to be able to demonstrate that the device can accurately and reliably measure in its intended use and show that any risk that it doesn't has been adequately reduced (I'm simplifying greatly).
Unfortunately it's basically impossible to test, after all how would one get ethical approval for exposing subjects to conditions of near-drowning, so one would be dependent on placing prototype devices on swimmers and catching episodes of near-drowning by chance. It would take a considerable length of time to gather sufficient data to confirm the reliability of the device under such conditions, obviously...
(and no, I would not consider it appropriate to test the device under general swimming conditions as these would not adequately predict performance under drowning conditions).
In terms of cost, an earlobe pulse oximeter doesn't have to be more expensive than a fingertip one (aside from some miniaturisation costs perhaps) but part of the costs of these devices is due to patent issues: http://www.law360.com/articles/106524/philips-accuses-pulse-...
just hold your breath for couple minutes (or even better - ask somebody physically stronger to "help" you to keep the plastic bag over you head to make sure that you make the time :) and i think you'll learn the difference. There is an extremely huge biological difference between "panic" and "fun/excitement".
Specifically to drowning there is also oxygen blood content difference - harder to detect from outside, yet an unmistakable indicator.
> just hold your breath for couple minutes (or even better - ask somebody physically stronger to "help" you to keep the plastic bag over you head to make sure that you make the time :) and i think you'll learn the difference.
That could easily kill someone, this is totally crazy advice.
man, I've put a smile there for a reason... The "help" is brought up as a device to illustrate the difference between at-will fun excitement and against-will panic. No sane person would be forcing another to not breath ( until of course it is a part of the job, ie. like police - chockholding into submission - or military investigators - waterboarding and the like)
Edit: to "mdup" below - i've specifically mentioned "until of course it is a part of the job" above - the major aspect of Milgram experiment was to present to the experiment subjects the shock delivery as a "duty".
It could? I mean it's obviously a terrible idea, but how is forcing someone to hold a full breath for two minutes going to cause them actual major harm? Can oxygen levels actually drop dangerously low that fast? People can hold their breath for that long with barely any setup or practice. Plus having a plastic bag to breathe in and out of should remove a lot of the discomfort and panic since mechanically you're still breathing.
Again, not saying it's a good idea, but the idea that it would kill someone suggests that I'm missing something I should know.
Very similar to blackout. [0] Depriving the brain of oxygen, in general, is a terrible idea and yes it can kill you.
Regardless if it is in a semi-controlled setting and if the intent isn't to continue until you black out but only until you begin breathing in a panic it's still very dangerous. [1]
Well your first link reads like media extrapolating a nationwide trend from next to nothing, and only really talks about the danger of doing it to yourself.
The second link doesn't mention timing except the standard 'five minutes' thing, while holding your breath for two minutes is probably going to lead to somewhere between 60 and 0 seconds of oxygen deprivation.
So I'm still unsure where the risk of dying comes from.
Right, that forces you to reach two minutes, and also makes sure the bag will be removed promptly.
As far as I can tell most of the danger comes from the possibility of having someone hold you still while you panic, and that is not what I generally consider deadly.
> Right, that forces you to reach two minutes, and also makes sure the bag will be removed promptly.
No, it does not make sure of that, besides it said 'a couple' and not 'two' (depending on the person two might very well be enough to harm them, but some might interpret 'a couple' as being even more than two).
The person was suggested to be there to make sure you can't remove the bag yourself and by the time the bag is finally removed it may simply be too late.
"Any activity that deprives the brain of oxygen has the potential to cause moderate to severe brain cell death leading to permanent loss of neurological function ranging from difficulty in concentration or loss of short term memory capacity through severe, lifelong mental disability to death."
Suggesting people do this is highly irresponsible, this is probably the dumbest sub-thread I've seen on HN in all the time that I've been here, which is especially annoying because the main thread is one of the best.
>"Any activity that deprives the brain of oxygen has the potential to cause moderate to severe brain cell death leading to permanent loss of neurological function ranging from difficulty in concentration or loss of short term memory capacity through severe, lifelong mental disability to death."
That cites source 12, which doesn't seem to support the critical "any activity" part of the sentence, at least in terms of how long the oxygen deprivation lasts.
>95.7% of these deaths occurred while the youth was alone
Seems to support my skepticism for a strictly-timed co-operative activity.
I'm not even sure you'd end up in oxygen deprivation at all within a couple minutes when you start with a nice big breath.
I'm sorry you think my question is dumb. I was just hoping to learn something. At this point I'm feeling reasonably confident that I wasn't unaware of important information, and 'dying' was strong hyperbole. I'll note again that I don't support actually doing it.
That's a fantastic question. This is probably the right place to ask if there is pattern that can be detected from the wrist. It also makes sense to line the pool edge with lights that can change color, so the bracelet distinctively lights up the grid square of the pool where the drowning is happening, alerting the lifeguard or a strong swimmer nearby.
That would probably cause a good deal of false alarms though.. people that aren't comfortable in water will have elevated heart rates every so often over normal stuff.
>"I wonder where you get/how you generate a dataset of the vital signs of drowning children..."
panic attack data set will get you halfway there and panic attacks happen naturally and sufficiently frequently. Add the dataset from something like asthma attacks (unfortunately it is easy to obtain too).
A summer camp I went to when I was younger was very heavily focused on swimming and water craft. We had 3 different colored bands to indicate your swimming ability. Red if you couldn't swim well, yellow if you were OK, but not enough for the deep end and green for the deep end. The counselors tested and trained the kids to go up the color bands, which was pretty neat, but I realize now that it was also a way to keep an eye on weaker swimmers. I think red bands had to have a life jacket on even while in the pool on the shallow end.
There was also the coveted blue band, which you could only get by doing a very rigorous set of tests and passing junior lifeguard training. I had to swim who knows how many laps and tread water for like an hour, plus lift bricks up off the pool floor and various other lifeguard-related things. The blue bands were super "rare" and I realize now it was just an inventive way to encourage the kids to swim better and harder.
Not exactly the same bands you were talking about, but a cheaper alternative and a good way to keep control and prevent drownings before they happen.
I would have been a blue band in your system. My parents moved to Cornwall when I was child, surrounded on 3 sides by water, I gained my surf lifesaving certificate, I was a good swimmer.
Almost two decades passes. I'm in Bali, on a deserted beach with my ex because we "don't want the average experience" or whatever. A small argument and I decide I want a swim. I walk out through the surf, my mind overcome with thoughts of the pathetic argument. I don't think about the undulating sand beneath my feet, but I should. Not even 2 minutes into my swim and I'm out a good 200m. I've swam 10km before in the sea, I'm fit enough, but I had been in a bicycle accident and fractured my dominant arm just 8 weeks prior. My natural confidence, my training, my accolades had resulted in my taking an unknown sea for granted. I looked to the sure, my girlfriend had vanished, no doubt going to lick her wounds from our previous verbal exchange.
I can honestly say the human mind is a strange thing under pressure. I thought back to being 12 and outright laughing at the tourists (emits, slang for ants in Cornish) who died every year often through a mix of alcohol and poor planning. The realisation of such past hubris was overwhelming. I also realised that the people I knew from there would be laughing at my death. I was now well over 1km from shore. My mind kicked in properly, I started swimming hard normal to the rip tide. After 5 minutes of treading water and thinking hard some rocks where looking achievable, so I decided to give it all in the hope of getting there, a fast sprint was my plan and thankfully this worked.
If ever I thought I'd given 100% to a physical activity before I was mistaken. My legs bore the brunt of this assault, my upper-body was uncoordinated due to the cycling injury. My watch was telling me I had been hard going for barely 10 minutes. I was not even half the way, my fear I think allowed for adrenaline to kick in, I was at this point making peace with death of drowning, as an asthmatic a death that has always scared me.
I made it to the rocks and to my joy I didn't need to climb along them, the rip tide was no more. I made it to shore. A half hour swim that had been like no other I've ever had and I hope will ever have. I was so upset with my ex for leaving me. Not watching nor caring as I had asked and she agreed. Going into the unknown water without someone aware is folly and I thought she would be observing me. Anger and most likely just bordem resulted in her not doing so.
TLDR: I was a good swimmer, I still so very nearly killed myself. Knowing when someone is in trouble requires education.
The real shame is you went on a beautiful vacation and ended up in an argument with your spouse. I hope you don't resent your spouse for getting up and leaving, especially since you put yourself in the position to swim while not mindful of your environment.
Also, a back-float is always generally a good strategy in salt water conditions when you've lost control or strength to swim. You carry over common waves and it takes very little energy.
Yeah, I'm having a hard time seeing how laying on your back to catch your breath is a bad idea. I thought everybody did that when swimming for extended periods of time.
The parent does mention swimming against a rip current, which would explain the need to swim at maximum physical exertion for an extended period of time. In that case I don't think he panicked.
Yes, that's what they meant. Rip tides aren't usually that wide. The best thing to do if you get caught in one is to remain calm and swim perpendicular to the current.
My local YMCA branch does the same thing, all minors are required to have a red, yellow or green breakaway necklace that indicate swimming level - kids with red bands cannot be in anything but the 1'6" kiddie pool without an adult within arms reach (parents still have to be supervising regardless), kids with yellow bands cannot go in the deep end of the pool but can be in the shallow end alone.
It's a really smart idea, and while even an excellent swimmer can become fatigued the more experienced ones will be less likely to need aid than the less experienced ones.
One of the most challenging bits with that is going to be transmitting RF underwater. And an interesting thing to think about is whether or not such a device would end up causing even more accidents, when people start just assuming that "it's ok if I go past my limits, someone will save me"
Underwater RF is no trouble in this case. You have the signal backwards. As long as there is no problem, regularly transmit an identity beacon. Loss of signal is the alert.
How does the regular beacon transmit if it's underwater? Someone standing in the shallow end of the pool or treading water in the deep end may pretty easily keep their wrist underwater for minutes at a time.
There's two things that such a device would need to have: quite low false positives (so that the lifeguard isn't distracted by false alarms - leading to a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario), and vanishingly small false negatives (the first time a kid dies because the device didn't work, it'll be a bad day). In-water RF would be very hard to do to make those two conditions true.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fabulous idea. Wearing my EE hat though, I haven't thought of a good way to do it that would work reliably enough for a life-saving device.
Last time I was at a water park like this, a child was right next to his mom's tube and she didn't recognize that he was having trouble swimming. When his head went under with him struggling I rescued him, she was mostly unphazed.. :-/
This makes me cringe. I had similar with my child. Was chatting in a pool and they were only under water right behind my back. I fortunately turned round right after they were going under. It would have been so easy to be talking/distracted for a minute and have a more tragic event. There was no noise, you had to actually see it. Everyone should teach their kids to swim as early as possible.
I witnessed a scene like this a while ago and it was such a pure horror, that I still get tears in my eyes when recalling the event.
I was lying with my wife next to the pool, casually watching. A small boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, stepped to the ladder and climbed down into the water, in a completely confident, unspectacular way. With the water up to his neck, he did not start to swim, though, but just continued downwards, slowly to the ground of the basin. I loved to enter the pool this way as a little boy as well.
The boy made no movement underneath the water, at all. He just sank to the ground and that was it. There was nothing suspicious, and it took us some time to realize that he would not come back up. I would guess roughly two minutes. Then we and some people in the pool realized he was not moving for too long. The boy was quickly recovered, lifeguards rushed in and reanimated the boy. It was a remote location and it took the emergency doctors 15 minutes to arrive, in which the boy was puking, caughing and barking his soul out. His mother was just 10 meters away when it happened and had a complete nervous breakdown when they reanimated the child in front of her eyes.
So there was a happy end, but we were shocked to the bones that a child almost drowned in plain sight, 4 meters away from us, WHILE WE WERE WATCHING THE CHILD DROWN. The disturbing point was, that this child showed absolutely no signs of panic - he did not wave the arms, tried not to grab something, made no swimming movements with the legs, just nothing!
A few weeks later I was back in the same water park (which has a dozen of pools and slides) with a group of 7 boys in that age celebrating a birthday. I can tell you, I had no real fun that day, desperately trying to track the bunch and not loose them for a minute.
Did the boy do this intentionally? Did he go unconscious when entering the pool? Was he trying to stay under as long as he could? Why was he not moving at all on the way in?
That wasn't an error, but the author made a few small errors (really, just unidiomatic phrases), which suggests he or she is not a native speaker of English:
> it was such a pure horror
> a happy end
> it did not wave the arms
> made no swimming movements with the legs
> a dozen of pools and slides
> 7 boys in that age
> not loose them
None of these are a big deal, though, and the writing was perfectly understandable.
Some languages (particularly German) use the neutral gender when referring to children. It's actually quite jarring for me as a German to have a child (especially a generic child) referred to as "he" or "she" in English.
I don't actually understand the downvotes you are getting, unless people think that this just isn't adding to the conversation, but in the interests of making lemonaide:
We often use neuter (gender-neutral) pronouns in English, just not this one. I've heard native English speakers say things like "If a mother wants to use the nursing room, they can just key in the code in their pamphlet". There are definitely restrictions on using 'gender-neutral they' but this kind of usage is totally normal.
Which is a great sentence, because semantically the pronoun referent is obligatorily female and singular. And yet, we use 'they' in this context. Which shows (among other things) that syntactic requirements can be relatively divorced from semantics. C'mon, that's pretty cool, right?
A language is defined in terms of how it is used, but a language is not supposed to be used in the way it was defined, if so, we'd still be speaking proto-indo-european, or maybe we'd never be able to speak, as there wouldn't exist any grammar before a language existed. So, being a grammar nazi is plain stupid.
Be charitable. If you haven't been exposed to actual linguistics (and know about things like PIE), you have the current, normal, common-sense view on language, which is that what you speak is normal, and what speakers of any other dialect or language do it wrong. I've heard intelligent, university educated people say things like "I don't want to learn $Language with an accent". The fact that no such 'accent-less' language exists is simply not a fact that they know. Such misconceptions about, and people who suffer under them are misguided, not stupid.
Misconceptions do not matter here. One may have misconceptions, but this does not justify correcting people for their grammatical errors on a thread that has nothing to do with grammar or whatsoever and thus hijacking it. It should be obvious that a serious lot of people here are not native-speakers.
You're right, of course, but this sounds pretty rude in English. It would be nice if there was some way to privately suggest a correction without making a big deal out of things.
As someone who speaks other languages, I know there's a point where it's hard to make progress because you are fluent enough to be understood easily and yet you make significant mistakes that nobody will bother to correct unless you ask.
I do not know for sure. My believe is, that kids at that age sometimes simply do not know what they are able to do or not. They watch others, as they climb down the ladder and they just imitate them, somehow expecting the same outcome. This boy for sure was not able to swim, but he probably didn't know it. He perfectly copied the behaviour of other people entering the pool and then was maybe completely stunned that he did not float, but sink, I guess. He was in a age where most kids in Germany are confident swimmers and like to dive as well. It was not obvious to us that something was wrong, because his behaviour was so confident. He did not hesitate to climb down, and there were no sudden unexpected movements when he was under. I mean, we did not watch him specifically and guessed whether he was in trouble or not - he was just behaving just like any other boy. And you do not press the stop watch when a kid enters a pool. It just took some time until our subconscious minds shouted "something is wrong - it is too long!".
He entered the pool, face to the stairs, hands on the rails, continued to climb until the ladder ended (with his head already under water), released the rails, and sank, vertically, until the bottom. It was not a very deep pool, maybe 1.70m or so. He seemed to stand there, as if trying to see how long he could keep his breath. And when he shifted out of the upright position it became obvious that he was in trouble. A man standing next grabbed him, pulled him up, saw the boy was unconscious, started to shout for help and within seconds the boy was out of the pool and the lifeguards took over.
Yes, I could see someone trying to hold their breath and becoming unconscious before they are able to surface, however the urge to breath usually becomes overbearing for me long before I would become unconscious.
It's just an interesting situation to think about, because how would you know? And, why wouldn't someone come up? Obviously he became unconscious at some point, but was it due to not being able to breathe? Or did something else happen to him as he was entering the water (eg. aneuyrsm, heart failure, etc). It's hard to believe it could have been an intentional act of the kid (suicide at 6? probably not very common) or that he would go into that part of the pool in the way you described without knowing how to swim.
I don't understand why he didn't float? In my experience you bob to the top because of the buoyancy of air in your lungs - not above the water, but you at least float to the surface. Am I wrong?
One might not realize it, but many people who already know how to swim will take a breathe in while lowering themselves into water. When diving to do a cannonball the first thing many swimmers will do is take a deep breathe. Someone who doesn't swim might... not.
A child who doesn't know how to swim but is copying what they see others doing might be breathing as normal, have exhaled recently, and when they release the handles/ladder and enter the pool begin to sink. Not knowing how to swim and now head-under-water they are unable to get air into their lungs to have any amount of buoyancy.
> In my experience you bob to the top because of the buoyancy of air in your lungs
Depends on a number of factors -- body composition (fat is less dense), how much air you have in your lungs (did you inhale or exhale before entering the water), etc.
If you ever enjoy experimenting with babies, this is how they will act when lowered into a pool. They will stand (or sit) on the bottom, holding their breath.
Having a tea party is much easier before you realize the danger consciously.
There's something I don't understand in this statement and in GP's story: when you stay static in the water, provided you don't carry extra weight, you just naturally go up and float to the surface. If you want to stay down, you have to actively move in order to counter Archimedes' force.
The reaction of babies is therefore perfectly adapted: stay calm, hold breath, wait until your lower density brings you back to the surface. Chaotic moves that counter this and burn your blood oxygen is actually what makes you drown yourself.
I think it depends on your density. If I exhale, I will sink. This is an item of curiosity to my wife, who has to work to stay underwater, even after exhaling completely. For more:
Actually, if you're carrying extra weight, you're more likely to float-fat is less dense than water. If you're skin, bones and muscle, you may very well sink without a breath of air.
I sank until I put on weight when I was about 19. Prior to that, with full lungs, I would reach buoyancy with my head about 6 inches under the surface. With no air, I sank like a rock. Now, with much more muscle and fat, I can float at the surface as long as I have some air.
> There's something I don't understand in this statement and in GP's story: when you stay static in the water, provided you don't carry extra weight, you just naturally go up and float to the surface. If you want to stay down, you have to actively move in order to counter Archimedes' force.
If you've got a lungful of air. Exhale first, and most people will sink like a stone.
My Dad had a trick, which I've done a few times myself as an adult, where he'd hyperventilate for a bit to get his blood heavily oxygenated, then exhale fully and just lie quietly on the bottom of the pool for a minute or so. (In the shallow end, so he only needed to stand up to breathe.) It's surprisingly soothing; after reading this thread, though, I'm not sure I'd do it at a public pool to avoid freaking out the lifeguard, and I certainly wouldn't teach any kids to do it.
(Floatation also depends a lot on your body fat percentage. Babies are very chubby, so they float, but I can imagine that a real lean kid in the middle of a growth spurt wouldn't be so buoyant.)
I once worked at a water park, for an entire month, as a teen. They would send weighted 'bodies' down the river to see if we rescued them. One time, they said they sent one and I missed it (and, boy, I must have really missed it cause I saw no such thing). At the time, I thought they were being a-holes testing me when there's no real danger. Looking back, I'm glad they tested us and I'm equally glad I stopped working there. You don't want that type of thing on your conscience.
I would like to point out that any flotation device in a pool besides a life jacket is just asking for problems.
I life-guarded for almost 10 years, the only way I would ever let anything that supported a human floating __besides__ an approved life jacket was if the pool was almost empty (such that the one person got my undivided attention) and if I knew the child to already be a strong swimmer.
I highly encourage everyone reading this to not swim at pools that allow floats of any kind besides a life jacket, even something as simple as water wings. [0] It encourages kids to go deeper than they should, and if they fall off they're in big trouble. It creates the possibility for a child to get trapped under someone else, and a life guard has almost no chance in that scenario.
95% of guarding is preventive.
Neat site though.
[0] Water wings can create the situation where a child has their head underwater and their arms up above water, but they can't pull themselves up.
That's what we use with our two year old son, though he's also only in pools with one-on-one attention. I'd prefer to just take him to shallower pools, but his feet just don't touch in any of our local pools, and puddle jumper seemed like a good option for him to have a little independent exploration in the water.
After looking it up, it is a coast guard approved flotation device, so I would have allowed it at my pools. That was my rule, and it was always nice having that when parents questioned my rule. Things like rafts, boogie boards, round tubes, noodles, those were the big no-no's.
We use those too and they are totally safe. The difference between those and the classic floaties is these can't come off, which I remember happening all the time with the old style.
Thanks, I saw the original comment and thought, oh no I just bought some new water wings for my son, and now I can't use them. Luckily I bought the ones you linked and now I know they are coast guard approved. Thank goodness for a wife who is detail oriented.
I was very close to drown when diving, and someone planted a 6 cm high, and 2*1 meter wide foam block[0] on top of where I had planned to surface, and I was caught underneath without much air.
I've never been close to drowning from something like that, but I've definitely felt that panic set in when you start swimming for the surface and then bump into a big float that wasn't there when you went down
As I guy with a young child, who ditched floaties and makes him always swim with a life jacket, thank you.
And thanks for watching other people's kids. Wage or not, that job can become real rewarding, especially once you are the humiliated and terrified parent.
I do not even let my kid walk around our community pool without it on!
A thankless job too, I remember hating life guards growing up because they would blow their whistle at all sorts of things. They aren't trying to be jerks of course, but that was my perception when I was very young and just loved swimming. Being older I see how tough that job would be.
I lifeguarded throughout high school and college, and it always surprised me that most of the difficulties I had were with parents/adults. For the most part, kids would give a sullen look and then listen. My only memorable troubles were the occasional adults who would just flat-out ignore or contradict rules, no matter how many times you told them (I always assumed because they thought they knew better than a ~15 year old). At that point, you have a young lifeguard who has to choose between causing a minor scene (ie: whistling a manager over to "tattle" on them) or having other children see rules not being consistently enforced, which they perceive as license to do whatever they want.
I made one rescue after a little girl faceplanted from the high dive and came up crying and clearly struggling - the whole time I was helping her to the wall, I had her mom yelling at me from the pool deck that "she's fine, you're just scaring her!" I came away from that second-guessing myself - that maybe I SHOULDN'T have gone in after her, and that I should've just let it play out a little more - which is a really scary thing to second-guess.
hey, look at it this way. the girl was fine. by definition, you did your job well. that's the best desired outcome of all cases, whether or not you made the wrong call.
If you get to know the lifeguards, most of them prefer the latter. I distinctly remember taking 2 umbrellas, one in each hand, and after climbing up onto the guardshack, taking a running leap into the pool.
Needless to say I had to buy 2 umbrellas least my boss found out.
I always likes horsing around with the kids, when we developed a relationship such that they listened to the rules, which really wasn't asking a lot. Don't run, don't dunk people, get out when I ask you do (adult swim, thunder/lighting) and stay out of the deep end if you haven't passed the swim test.
There are boring guards, just like there are boring people. I have found that men and women (mostly teenagers at that point) who elect to hang out in their bathing suits (read: basically underwear) 40 hours a week are usually a lot of fun to be around. There is a specific sense of self-confidence that I never really thought about until replying to your comment.
I was around four-five years old when I was first allowed into the deep pool with some float equipment. I was like a fish and liked diving. Couldn't swim though.
When I jumped into the deep pool my floating equipment was pushed off. I panicked and struggled for my life until I somehow got to the side and then managed to get up by myself. And no-one noticed.
I stayed away from deep water until I could swim properly.
When I was 11, I had just discovered I could kind-of swim and somehow decided to try swimming across a rather large lake. By the time I realized that was a dumb idea, I was halfway across. I collapsed from exhaustion and threw up several times after I (somehow) got across.
When I was a teenager I was in Boy Scouts. Every year we went to a summer camp that was on the edge of a large pond [1]. And one of the strictest rules there was that you were not allowed in the water until you'd passed the swimming competency test (and you had to pass it again every single year), and the main swimming test was that you had to swim laps in their roped-off section of the lake without pausing until you'd swum for at least half of the distance across the lake (thus ensuring that if you were to be dropped smack dab into the middle of the lake, you could swim out). We had to do this even though most scouts never even had a reason to go outside the small roped-off section and thus would never be required to actually swim to shore.
I also remember one year doing a lifeguarding merit badge where we did various things like tread water for an excessively long period of time, practice towing other people to shore, and even a bit where we had to jump into the water fully clothed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and learn how to float regardless (basically by inflating our shirt with air). That stuff was hard. Also one bit where we started on shore, fully-clothed including jeans, socks, laced-up boots, etc, and had to ditch as much clothing as possible and run into the water within an extremely short period of time (the idea being if we saw someone drowning, we had to be able to get in the water to effect a rescue as fast as possible).
[1] New England has a habit of calling large bodies of water "ponds" even though most other places would call them lakes
Man, BSA lifeguard was rigorous as hell. It was the only legitimately serious course that the camp offered, and it was not for beginners. I failed it the first year, and it taught me a lot about the difference between "can swim" and "competent swimmer."
They later changed it to a gimme course because of "hazing" complaints, which I thought was awful.
I didn't even consider trying the lifeguarding merit badge for the first couple of years. I doubt I could have done it back then.
> They later changed it to a gimme course
That sucks. I'm also kind of surprised to hear that, because BSA does not usually skimp on safety, and anyone with the lifeguarding merit badge should be capable of actually saving someone's life.
Honestly, it's been so long, I forget. I actually did a bit of searching when I wrote that to see if I could find the camp, but I had no luck. It looks like the Boy Scout Council my troop was a member of has changed what summer camp they use in the many years since I was last there, and I can't actually find any reference to what the name of the old camp was.
Took my young son to a cub scout camp this summer. The swim test was just as grueling. My son didn't pass at all even though he has had swim lessons and can swim. He was just too nervous at the testing aspect of it.
I swam two out of two and a half laps, but I didn't pace myself well enough, and I ended up having to stop. Partially, I was out of breath, partially, my shoulder was bothering me due to a healed fracture from a car accident last fall. First time I had done any significant amount of swimming since then and didn't realize how far from 100% I was. Was a bit embarrassing getting the "beginner" swim label, but I had to be a good role model and take my lumps.
Having guarded for several years at a popular club (and having had one of only two requires saves at the club in my tenure) I can tell you this isn't true. I will allow that their parents should pay closer attention (or attention at all).
Fatigue sets in quickly (and sometimes almost instantly). In my case it was a young girl who was a fine swimmer (on the swim team) and had been playing in the pool all day on a hot and crowded July day. She got a little far away from the wall in an area between 5-6 feet, very much like the video, and suddenly found herself struggling to break the surface of the water.
It happens fast, and can happen to kids you would never suspect would find themselves in trouble.
> "very much like the video, and suddenly found herself struggling to break the surface of the water."
I am unable to view OP's site at the moment so I'm not sure if you mean there was something on top of her.
Anyway, in open water "being able to swim" should include a "rescue/recovery float" ability. AKA, the ability to float indefinitely with little or no expended effort (ideally no effort at all, but some people have body builds which make light sculling necessary). If they can't do that, they aren't ready to swim in deep water.
That is the standard we used when I was a lifeguard and swim instructor (well, instructor assistant).
Only if unsupervised. It's very easy to underestimate how quickly things can change.
On a slightly more positive note, this is a clip from BBCs Fantastic The Human Body. It talks about and shows the natural abilities of babies to swim at a very early age.
If you're politically correct/sensitive, you may want to skip it. It does show genitals.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fbSCSHzXkrI
water wings are also terrible at teaching kids to swim: they can't properly use their arms wearing wings.
I had both my kids (currently 3 and 5) learn to swim by having them wear inflatable vests. When they started they had fully inflated vests. every week or so I would deflate it bit by bit, until they are wearing a fully deflated vest. At that point the vest is just for emotional support, and they can pretty much handle the water without drowning (though still need proper lessons of course)
The funny thing is that I remember as a kid using a borrowed set of water wings (I'm assuming those are the inflatable things that go on the upper arms?). I was like 9 years old, and could barely swim by doing a back stroke (floating on my back, and somewhat making my way across the water). But when I put those water wings on, it gave me just enough support that I learned that afternoon how to do a breast stroke and side stroke, and ended up being a fairly strong swimmer after that (only used them that one time though).
That makes me think. Could one make a remote inflatable vest? Basically, one of those vests they equip aircraft with, but with a remote control attached as well. While deflated, it wouldn't have a significant effect on buoyancy or encumbrance, so the child could learn to swim naturally. If one notices one's child in distress one could inflate it with the push of a button.
And when it fails, and a toddler dies, the lawsuit would be enough to totally bankrupt the startup. Simply not worth the risk. I like the idea of using reactive technology to improve the cruft of aversion-type devices though.
I feel like this is why Hovding says it's "not intended for people under the age of 15". It's not that it wouldn't work most of the time, if not "all but a single time" and are simply protecting themselves from a possible lawsuit.
What's to prevent a condom-like "99% success rate" as legal backing for "haha can't sue us if it fails because we didn't promise 100% success rate"? Even though, effectively and when used properly, they have a 100% success rate... it's just there for legal reasons to prevent lawsuits.
When we put both my young kids through swim lessons, they were taught with "bubbles", little foam blocks that are strapped to the middle of the back, and the number of bubbles are reduced as their proficiency increases. That left their arms and chest free to work on actual swimming form. When working on kicks, they held on to little floating dumbell bars.
If I'm being honest, this is the kind of thing I would not have allowed. As you describe, your child can make it a few meters away from the side of the pool. Then what?
If your child gets tired, this will not help. This looks like it forced the child into a face-down position, and a tired child forced to be face-down in water doesn't seem like a great idea.
As a fellow parent of a 1.5 year old, I'm sure you've heard of latent drowning. [0] This device seems like it could promote the chances of that happening as well.
Looks reasonable as a support when your child is being taught how to swim (and is thus closely monitored). Looks absolutely horrible as a means of preventing your kid from drowning though.
disclaimer: I'm not in any way a professional when it comes to water safety, so this is just a remark; not advice.
Yea, it looks like a useful tool to provide support while following the warnings:
Warning: Not suitable for children under 36 months
Warning: Only to be used in water in which the child is within its depth and under adult supervision
Warning: To be used under the direct supervision of an adult
I don't think it's a mistake that "under adult supervision" is said twice.
When I was a young child, my local pool allowed kids to play on large floating foam rafts (like this, but half the length: http://goo.gl/7Y4HbU). One day I decided to show off my underwater swimming skills to a girl I fancied. After a long swim underwater, I exhausted my breath and came to resurface for air, only to get caught under a stacked pile of 5 of these rafts, with kids standing on top like in that photo! I panicked and didn't know what was going on. I don't remember what happened next, but I am told my father was watching me closely and jumped into the pool, pushed the mats off of me (thus throwing like 4 kids off the rafts into the water) and saved me.
Parents were angry at him for throwing their kids into the water. None of them even realized I had almost died. Not that I blame them though, it would probably look pretty funny to see a grown man knock 4 kids off some mats into the pool haha.
Your humorous view on an otherwise harrowing story brought a smile to my face. Glad you made it. My dad was a life-guard though I never asked him for any stories, I should do that.
Yeah, I remember the same thing happening to me as well when I was young. Luckily in my case I had enough air to use my hands to pull myself along the underside to the edge. But you instantly thought "That was far too close". I wonder if they still have those in schools with pools nowadays.
I once got "trapped" under one of those big diving rafts they put in lakes[1]. I swam down after one of those colored diving rings, and the wind blew the raft over me while I was under.
I was a pretty strong swimmer at that point, and more than a little lucky as well. I was able to collect my thoughts and get out.
I'm told I was only under there for about ten seconds, but my memory of it feels like about 2-3 minutes. It was easily the scariest thing that ever happened to me personally as a child.
Once we did rafting and our monitor guy told us: when you fall into the water and find yourself under the boat, just don't panic. Don't try to move your head up but rather chose whatever direction and swim until you reach the either side. We thought it would never happen, but we ended up few times in the water just like just like that. And even though it's just a few seconds you are quite disoriented and at first time don't know what to do.
I came to realize that a lot of things in life are easy when you practice beforehand. It's a good idea to identify things you don't expect how to handle and then go and learn to handle them. It's especially important to learn how to use the tools you may need in emergency so that they won't surprise you when you need to use them quickly. Otherwise having those tools only gives you false sense of confidence, which may be dangerous.
So for instance, I bought a fire extinguisher and used it up in some deserted bushes. It was a small expense, but now I'm fully aware how this particular type of extinguishers behave. Or when a friend wanted to buy mace (she was coming home late at night), we bought two and used up one for doing target practice, so that she's aware how the fluid stream behaves and how to aim it.
The biggest problem with this approach that I find is that there are so many things you could prepare yourself. Even if it usually would just take a few minutes and little to no expense, you can't train for things you don't realize exist as concepts or situations. For instance, thanks to this subthread it is the first time it occured to me that a situation like obstructed surface when diving in a pool can occur. I'm adding it to my mental list of things to prepare for when I get the opportunity.
Having done whitewater kayaking for a long time I cannot stress this enough. You need to practice being under water with being denied surfacing even if you strongly want to.
Once you are calm, you can orient yourself by observing air bubbles for example, even in turbulent water.
As a kid I always hated water wings. Luckily my parents gave up on them pretty quick too. They made it hard to move your arms properly and didn't provide good floatation anyway.
That would make for a pretty fucking boring pool, honestly. No flotation devices would mean that all I could do as a kid would be to stand around on my tiptoes.
I'm not saying you drew the line in the wrong place, as I know nothing about the subject, but surely you could also close the pool so nobody can use it for the same reason of "saving lives, not providing entertainment"
You could run the pool by saying any child under 16 needs to be accompanied into the pool by an adult and can never be more than 2m away from that adult, one adult per child. Hell why only children, everyone in the pool needs one designated person they won't go more than 2m away from so they can watch each other.
You could introduce a rule that nobody can speak or make any noises that aren't a direct result of swimming, so that when someone is in trouble it's easier to hear them and/or someone else alerting to the problem.
Both of those would still be running the pool, both of them would make it easier to keep people from drowning, and it wouldn't be impossible to have fun. It would be much less fun, but not impossible.
But you've drawn a line that those rules would be going too far, whereas banning flotation devices isn't too far. You've balanced in your mind safety vs. entertainment to see what's worth doing and what isn't. I'm not arguing with your decisions, I know nothing about keeping swimmers safe, I'm just saying in response to "my job was to guard lives, not provide entertainment" that if you really didn't care about anything other than saving their lives you could be much stricter and make the pool much less fun, but a tiny bit more safe.
At family pool parties I had a cousin who thought it was a fun game to try to trap me underneath a raft to prevent me from surfacing for air. He was 12, I was 8. Fun times. Learned how to hold my breath, that's for sure.
When I was a kid I was using these life belt, one day I flipped upside down, my feet were up in the air, my head bellow water. I couldn't flip again, I almost died if it wasn't for my dad who jumped in the water to rescue me after a while.
When I was a kid I put water wings on my ankles so I could walk on the water like Jesus. I fell over within 0.5 seconds of entering the pool and they held me upside down with my feet sticking out. I remember thinking I was going to die right up until my Mom jumped in and saved me.
This video is one I recognize from the series of pool rescues that was on HN a few days back. Having watched a number of videos from that wave pool, I can confirm that "kid flips tube after climbing on it and is dumped face down" is probably the #1 thing that leads to a rescue.
That said, if you're watching for them, I just sort of defocus to watch the whole pool at once and look for the particular splashes of the drowning person's "swim" that become distinctive after you've seen it enough times.
I don't mean any disrespect, and I do agree with the point about "encourages them to go deeper...", but I think "any flotation device" "besides a life jacket" is a little bit hardcore. We can't make everything 100% fool proof and 100% safe in every way without removing all activities. Parents need to pay attention to their kids' swimming abilities and govern their activities accordingly. If a kid can't swim really well, the wave pool (or at least the deep end of one) is not a safe place to be at all.
Less than 1000 deaths by drowning is a really small number in a country with tens of millions of children swimming every year.
The issue is with the parents, who just want to let the kid in the pool so they can go back to their phone.
I do volunteer work with my local surf live saving club, looking after the kids in the under 7 program. It is exhausting work standing in the surf watching 30-40 kids at once. Most parents see it as a child-minding surface and are content to sit way up on the beach with a coffee and a phone.
The point is the parents - in many if not the majority of cases - don't pay attention to their kids swimming abilities.
I would think it should be common sense to not go to the deep end without a life saving device if I don't know how to swim.
Sometimes I get cramps(? Not sure if right word?) In my legs that hamper my ability to swim. It scares me to think what I'd do if I had to swim in anything other than a small pond. I'm not a good swimmer to begin with.
So I'll admit, I didn't set the rules, I enforced them. I agreed with them, but I was not the rule-setter.
I'll also say that I could find ~1000 families who are probably devastated every year, most likely any marriage that existed was challenged, and possibly broken up. Lives changed forever. Why? So some kid who can't swim could float in 6 feet of water for a few minutes.
Yes it is on parents as well. I am a parent. Fortunately I can swim well. I am not the parent that takes their child to the kiddie pool, and while I'm in the middle of a sneeze, my child takes off and jumps feet-first into the "big" pool, and I can't do anything to save them because I can't swim.
I'll agree 100% that the parents that showed up at my pool and took a 2 hour nap, those were bad parents. I woke them up when their child was misbehaving, and sometimes just because I was severely annoyed.. My guards were guards, not baby-sitters.
Perhaps my child is hanging out with friends, and one of the friends parents takes them all to the community pool. I'm not there. Is is still on me as a parent?
I understand and appreciate your comment. Life just isn't that simple sometimes.
My first comment was asking why most of the people were in those rubber things. If most of them can't swim, it is really dangerous for it calls for a high level of alertness on the life-guard part when the people shouldn't be there in the first place. And no, that's not really the job of the life-guard to watch over all of those.
That's like putting someone to watch over a large number of drunk people moving around and having fun in a porcelain shop and make sure none of them breaks anything.
A person unable to swim simply doesn't belong in a swimming pool deep enough that she can drown. She should be the exception rather than the norm.
I may seem dramatic, but this is really a bad thing waiting to happen. And it's already happening. If you couldn't spot the kids in that cluster-mess, that's bad news.
In my opinion, those who don't know yet how to swim should be in a pool of an appropriate depth. This is why you have different pools for swimmers and non-swimmers, or one pool with a gradient of depths.
Also the people responsible for the kid.. if the kid will be in the water unattended, the top priority is to make sure he's comfortable in the water (how to float, how to relax, etc).
Nobody should drown in a darn swimming pool! It's a darn swimming pool!
There are tons of all kinds of floaties in every pool I've seen in BC, Canada. The life guards seems pretty strict there, but maybe not for banning floaties.
I have no lifeguarding experience nor education, but what you are saying seems important. Any known research or training practices for lifeguards that would support your claim? I could start a dialogue with our local pool with something like that.
I don't know anything about your old profession but I know that every adventure bath place I've been to in Sweden with a wave maker have always asked everyone to take all toys out of the water before the wave maker starts.
As far as I see it, there are two use cases for a pool, swimming and fun. I'd agree with you if you were talking about a pool with swimming lanes. The point of the pool in the video on the website is to have fun. If you make it safe, you kill the fun.
You are right, of course, but that's why things shouldn't be black and white. There is a difference between banning everything except "approved" life jackets and banning large inflatable pads which children could get stuck under. If you look at the website, the majority of people in the pool are hanging on the blue inflatable tubes. They would not be in the pool at all if they had to actually swim.
When I was younger (say, 7 or 8 years old), I considered myself a good swimmer and as part of my swimming lessons we were told to do length-ways with the aid of a swimming board [0] at arms' length.
Approaching the 3/4 mark of the length, I felt it slipping out of my hands and in my panic, I went down. I woke up after being resuscitated after a lifeguard noticed I was in trouble under the water. He had jumped from the top step of his high chair straight in apparently and literally threw me out of the water to a waiting colleague.
Not sure if I'd trust my own children with that type of flotation aid again, but as you said, it encouraged me to swim outside of my comfort zone and I panicked so perhaps more control is needed of when and where it is used.
I noticed this is likely a video from a "security" camera. Would it be possible to apply Motion Detection Algorithms software to realtime video for the purpose of alerting lifeguard of a possible drowning based on the IDR gestures?
Fellow HN readers: We're a smart bunch of hackers. Why don't we have a startup working on a technology that could recognize and alert lifeguards when swimmers are in danger? I bet a few cameras and some (admittedly advanced) machine learning could spot swimmers in need of assistance.
I was actually spending quite some thought about this. At least for water parks, I think this should be doable. My idea was to have a wide angled camera above the pool (distortion is not a problem here), with an algorithm that would recognize any structure that is not moving for a given time (lets say 30 seconds). This would create many false positives, probably, but the system could just activate a buzzer and zoom to the spot on a display that would be permanently monitored by some lifeguard. The number of false positives could probably be dramatically reduced, if there was some way to only react to non-moving-structures underneath the surface, maybe by some cameras from the side?
Problem is, when I was doing my lifeguard training they showed us / told us how the surface of the water distorted swimmers and who / what is below the surface. A towel or swim toy can look like a person once fully submerged. (it is required to wear polarized sunglasses in chair) You would need cameras under the water, focused on the bottom of the pool to be of any use I imagine. As a lifeguard, our main objective is scanning for signs of struggle yes, but also to be checking for bodies below the surface. With unresponsive victims, every second counts.
I like the idea, but the stakes are really high in downing. At some point you want it to be helpful, but not to be so good as to make the human lifegaurd not pay full attention.
Machine learning might not be the way to go here..
It definitely in the realm of possibilities. They're starting to do the camera assist in the checkout product theft prevention.
They're pretty clearly not saying that no solution could be better than a human. They're saying that a solution which isn't as good as a human, combined with a human, could be worse than a human without the inadequate solution, which is true.
We have some pretty good machine learning tech out there, but I'd reckon we're quite a ways off from the proposed startup focusing on replacing lifeguards with computers even at spotting functionality, let alone the other functions necessary (retrieval, resuscitation iff actually necessary, etc.).
Sure, someday we'll have robots do everything for us. We're not quite there yet.
A rectangular pool with a flat bottom (probably accounts for the majority of pool volume world-wide) would be pretty easy to have full camera coverage over with minimal image distortion. Each object could be easily tracked for time underwater, depth, etc. (and expanded to track fine motion as well) Objects that stay near the bottom are suspect. The system could alert lifeguards to the exact location of a victim.
You could even have an auto-drain feature if you desired.
Right, but my point is that we're not quite at the point where a computer can reasonably process that much visual input, determine whether or not something is exhibiting the signs of drowning, and alert a lifeguard with a minimum of errors. False positives will lead to personnel confusion, and false negatives will lead to dead swimmers.
This isn't to mention that automation does encourage complacency. One of the primary reasons for the recent Malaysia Air jet disappearances according to investigations is an excessive reliance upon automated systems to fly planes, and insufficient knowledge of flying without such tools. I reckon a similar situation could be a real danger here as well (if not amplified considerably; most lifeguards (at least where I've lived) were usually highschool students doing it as an extracurricular/volunteer activity, summer job, etc., and teenagers aren't exactly known for having an above-average attention span).
That's what I meant by "personnel confusion", yes. A.k.a. the "cried 'wolf'" effect; how can a lifeguard be expected to treat this alarm seriously when all the other ones have been false positives?
As a non-lifeguard, I would rather have a machine than trust myself. So ideally, you would have both a lifeguard and another independent monitoring system for non-lifeguards. They could be fail-safes for each other.
The first challenge is training data. 10-100 videos of people beginning to drown would be a good start.
It also might be highly pool dependent. The different shapes, styles and attractions at the pool will all make a difference. Wave pool vs slope vs dropoff etc
393 comments
[ 1.0 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadThis is a great use of the web. Good job!
It would also help if the video automatically scaled to fill as much of the window as possible. On my screen it was a quarter of the entire screen and everything was really tiny.
I'll look into a good cross-browser auto zoom.
I also had some trouble getting the hang of what I was supposed to do. I'd recommend an interstitial to get people going before the video starts. Maybe something like this?
You are about to watch a recorded video of typical activity at a pool. Help the life guard watch all the swimmers in your half of the pool.
If you see someone who needs help from the life guard, click on them in the video and check the results at the bottom of the video.
Since life guards can't do it (as much as they might wish they could!) don't rewind, pause or click the video while being tested unless you would be ready to blow the whistle, jump in, and swim to someone.
The next one in the tidal wave pool I clicked and all it did was pause the video, and when I continued the video the kid was being rescued.
I like this though, good training, for everyone.
http://spotthedrowningchild.com/creator.html#T5mDQeDkca0
How would you set this scenario up?
I found the description of the Instinctive Drowning Response insightful.
The guard(s) worry about every single person in the pool at all times. Well, the good guards anyways.
I'd spend every minute counting the kids, making sure none of them were missing. At the camp I worked on, you not only had to worry about actual drownings, but also administrators who would try and "steal" a kid about once a week from unobservant counsellors, then call a waterfront drill where all the lifeguards on staff had to search the entire waterfront for a "missing" camper. Until the drill was over, no-one involved (including the counsellor who had lost their kid, lifeguards wearing masks searching under the docks etc.) knew if it was real, or a drill.
In the 5-summers I worked there, I took it as a point of pride that none of my campers were ever stolen, and I never saw another counsellor have their kid successfully stolen more than once. The shame and terror of spending about 5-minutes thinking, "Oh shit, I might have just let a child die" was a pretty effective motivator.
I was a lifeguard, so I can speak with some authority. Both skills are necessary. Not only do you have to count and track swimmers, but you have to keep mental notes about their abilities, be aware of what they're doing, and imagine possible outcomes so you can identify and react quickly to the actual outcomes. If your attention wanders for too long, especially at a busy place, you can easily lose track of someone. If you lose track of the wrong person, well, buckle up.
Fortunately, there are usually multiple lifeguards on duty with you, you're usually on a strict 10- or 15-minute rotation with them, and one of the stations is the break room. That helps a lot.
Lifeguarding at a camp is at least 5 times more difficult than at a pool, and I suspect that's why they ran drills to keep the lifeguards on their toes. Underwater visibility is usually next to nothing. The lake is usually full of teenage boys. Access to the water is effectively unlimited. There are often a lot of occluders, such as boats and bushy shores.
1) To keep counsellors attentive to the specific children under their care.
2) To give the lifeguard's the chance to practice their missing child search procedures.
It was stressful, and it was effective.
That said, my bosses weren't huge assholes and didn't disappear kids regularly like yours sound like they did. We had drills, but you could tell by the demeanor of the director that it wasn't real.
Plus, it wasn't a secret. We all knew it was happening. If all the counsellors down by the waterfront were being attentive and they couldn't steal a camper, one of the admins would just come up to a counsellor and ask us to take one of our kids, and tell us to go report a missing camper to the lifeguard in about 5-minutes.
Now as a parent, I'd much rather send my kid to a camp where the counsellors are terrified of losing my kid, than one where they're not.
There are many better, more effective ways to ensure you're not going to lose a kid. We did things like count children before/after each activity, run drills at regular (not weekly) intervals, etc.
We also had games where kids were left to run in the forest for multiple hours unaccompanied (variations on capture the flag). The kids loved it, your kid would love it, and the counselors in charge of your kid wouldn't be obsessively paranoid about the exact location of your child at every single moment because that level of attention just isn't necessary.
The point of drills that simulate reality effectively is to get you comfortable enough with taking the necessary actions at the required times that you will not have terror instilled in you. This is why armies around the world all do 'live fire' exeercise and so on, and why companies run BAU or DR failover tests.
If not, then yeah this is a terrible idea.
Really the most worrying part of the whole thing was teaching the stolen kids that if an adult walks up to them and tells them to quietly sneak away, they get ice cream.
The job was sometimes so intense I'd wake up in the middle of the night in a panic because I thought I had forgotten my whistle or someone was having an emergency. Props to anyone who does it. When executed well and carefully, it's not exceptionally hard work but any lapse of judgement for even a moment can lead to disaster.
I had the same waking panics while being a camp counsellor. We'd have 7 day sessions with 3 day breaks in between and quite often those breaks were punctuated with waking up bolt upright to figure out where my kids were. Took a while for that to pass.
Also took a while to remember how to eat slowly (you eat quick, or you don't eat!)
Is this in any way related or inspired by that post?
/Start edit
>Inspired by this hackernews thread: can you notice who's drowning in the pool before the lifeguard does?
Answered my own question by reading the About on the Github. :D
/End edit
This is a great thing to share on Facebook (for those who have it). It's one of the lessons that really sticks with someone, because of how terrifying the reality of drowning really is. So thank you for sharing/making it.
Also for the timer "score", might I suggest clarifying it a bit with "faster/slower than the lifeguard"? I was a bit confused if my time was +0.82s past the lifeguard noticing" or "0.82s faster". I had to 'play' a second time and purposefully click late to figure it out.
>Nicely done. +0.82s
I think it should be made a bigger deal of. Often holiday pools are not guarded and if everyone around knows the signs then someone can be saved.
Things spread insanely fast on Facebook. If a few parents shared this website and their also-parent friends shared it with their friends it could easily get millions of views within several days. And parents would share this information.
If you think it should be made a bigger deal of - why not make it a bigger deal? Message your school district representatives about swimming education, especially identifying when someone is drowning. Start a funding for a public pool for your town/city, if one doesn't exist, and support the school organizing "field trips" to the public pool to provide such an education.
You'll likely get ignored. So start talking with other parents and make it a large enough issue that it can't be ignored. I don't think many parents would be against their child being taught how to swim, practice pool safety, and learn a life skill that could save someone's life. The main issue is getting them to think about it in the first place.
The hardest part about getting anything done is finding a leader with the drive and ability to get things done. Few people want to step up and even fewer of those that are willing are capable.
Also, how do you differentiate the drowning response from someone that's just bad at treading water and floats low in the water? They might both be bobbing just in and out of the water, but one of them can just transition to floating on their back and the other is trying to not drown. (I haven't swam in forever and don't know if I can even swim anymore, but I was reminded of childhood swimming lesson tests.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947237
Always trust yourself. Any suspicion on your part is more than enough reason to go help. These guards have excellent reactions and don't try to make a judgement call between distress and drowning. While new to the job, I hesitated trying to verify patrons needed a rescue instead of going in immediately.
While this is anecdotal, I also found that poor treaders often made attempts to move to more secure depths. Struggling is no fun, and most people swim to have fun. The dangerous cases were people who did not know their swimming ability chasing family into the deep end.
Lastly we didn't allow floaties in the water, and I think everyone who sees this video should notice the trend and think twice about them.
Watch the face, arms and legs, and water surface. A swimmer in distress has his mouth as high as possible, may be flailing a little with his arms, barely kicks (if at all), barely disturbs the surface of the water, and goes under repeatedly.
But as a lifeguard, I helped weak swimmers, and then requested very firmly that they stay in shallow water. I also took their names so I could get their attention quickly if they wandered too close to the deep end.
Do adults drown as often as children?
When an adult or adolescent drowns, it looks exactly the same, they're much more dangerous to would-be helpers, and half the time they're drunk and surrounded by drunk people.
Deaths per 100,000 people (drowning), Canada, 2006-2010:
0-4: 1.1
5-12: 0.6
13-17: 0.9
18-24: 2.2
24-34: 1.6
34-49: 1.4
50-64: 1.7
65+: 1.6
I don't have the source handy, but I'll try to dig it up.
Edit: Source - http://www.lifesavingsociety.com/media/157475/2013-cdndrowni...
http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html
I did 18-24, it says 1.18.
24-34, 0.98.
5-12, 0.49.
I wonder what factors into the differences. I'm sure things like number of guarded facilities, number of swimmers and amount of swim classes are important, it's the specific differences that would be interesting.
I've played water polo for several years. When participating in an activity where it's mandatory to wear a life jacket, I do, but is there really a point?
But at least keep the life jacket near you (ie on the boat), that way you can put it on if necessary - and never ever go out unless there is a suitable life jacket for every person on the boat.
Also never wear an inflated life jacket inside a ship (if it sinks and you become trapped you can't escape).
>Many passengers died because they inflated their life jackets in the cabin, causing them to be trapped inside by the rising water. This led to future notices about not inflating the vests before exiting the plane.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_961
But first: another water poloist! Awesome! Water polo was pretty small in my area, so we didn't have a lot of talent in the pool. (Pun intended.) I swam distance on the swim team and was a decent sprinter, so my coach had me play both offensive and defensive hole. My best friend could keep his navel above the water for minutes, so he played keeper behind me. I still love to get my hands on a ball and demo the backwards corner shot. Fun times.
Conscious able swimmers have usually been taught how to lie still and float on their backs, or will figure it out quickly if in calm water. They can often call for help, and will do so, interspersed with periods of rest. (Shouting takes a lot of energy.) If the water is warm, they might have hours to get rescued. If the water is cold or even just lukewarm, how long they have depends on a lot of factors, especially the temperature and whether hypothermia is setting in - but in any case they have a lot less time.
Able swimmers, especially those who are good enough to swim a mile, often underestimate the effects of cold water on the body.
They also tend to underestimate the tremendous strength of moving water. Anybody in moving water who is in distress should be helped ASAP, no matter how good they are at swimming. Moving water is a destroyer and an equalizer.
That leaves us with unconscious swimmers. Nobody swims well while unconscious. :) If there's a chance something could knock you out, whether a boat, an overhanging branch, exposure to cold water, or (for those of extended age) a heart attack, put on a well-fitting life jacket.
In my team the hole would go defend number 3 usually. Defending the other hole is intense.
I see, moving water, cold water and being knocked out. Thanks for the explanation!
Your brain soon kicks into holding your breath while watching kids swim, if one is splashing around while you start to feel uncomfortable it's time to wade in and drag them to the surface.
Often for us it was the uneven sea bottom, someone takes a step forward and plunges out of their depth. Run over and hoik them out.
To this day, when the surf is up and I see toddlers paddling I get chills and can't stop watching them. Doesn't take more than an inch of water for them to fall and start rolling out with the backwash.
I learned a new word today.
>2. To lift something up wildly.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=golly&defid=6...
To hoik a golly. I last heard that in the 70s. Not so charming...
https://bob520.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/tragedy-by-the-sea-p...
2. They are are at the pool, not watching a grainy video via YouTube
The mother and child were only about 10 feet from me and even I didn't recognize it, and I was a lifeguard 15 years ago! That experience frightened me more than most because it showed me how bad I and others are at recognizing drowning.
Glad that this exists so more people understand what drowning really looks like.
I do work in this field (wireless vital signs monitoring) and unfortunately I don't know of any current technology that I would trust to monitor heart rate on a swimmer other than perhaps a chest strap (but not as a safety device either). For a point of reference, the Apple watch fails to accurately record heart rate when very sweaty or experiencing periodic movement (such as the periodic arm waving).
There was a kickstarter project for a swim safety device (mentioned by others in this thread) but I believe that was based around picking up the arm movement characteristic of this response, which may be a sensible approach (I don't know enough about the characteristic motions of the drowning response vs regular splashing).
It wouldn't be able to interface with a device the lifeguard has in this case, but it could surely start making noise and/or flashing in an emergency.
A device for alerting for a drowning subject would be classified as a medical device (in Europe most likely class IIb as it is measuring a vital function in a life support scenario) as the malfunction of the device could fail to prevent the saving of a life. The burden of certification of such a device is understandably high, and one would have to be able to demonstrate that the device can accurately and reliably measure in its intended use and show that any risk that it doesn't has been adequately reduced (I'm simplifying greatly).
Unfortunately it's basically impossible to test, after all how would one get ethical approval for exposing subjects to conditions of near-drowning, so one would be dependent on placing prototype devices on swimmers and catching episodes of near-drowning by chance. It would take a considerable length of time to gather sufficient data to confirm the reliability of the device under such conditions, obviously...
(and no, I would not consider it appropriate to test the device under general swimming conditions as these would not adequately predict performance under drowning conditions).
In terms of cost, an earlobe pulse oximeter doesn't have to be more expensive than a fingertip one (aside from some miniaturisation costs perhaps) but part of the costs of these devices is due to patent issues: http://www.law360.com/articles/106524/philips-accuses-pulse-...
Specifically to drowning there is also oxygen blood content difference - harder to detect from outside, yet an unmistakable indicator.
That could easily kill someone, this is totally crazy advice.
Edit: to "mdup" below - i've specifically mentioned "until of course it is a part of the job" above - the major aspect of Milgram experiment was to present to the experiment subjects the shock delivery as a "duty".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Again, not saying it's a good idea, but the idea that it would kill someone suggests that I'm missing something I should know.
Regardless if it is in a semi-controlled setting and if the intent isn't to continue until you black out but only until you begin breathing in a panic it's still very dangerous. [1]
[0] http://www.today.com/parents/kids-are-passing-out-deadly-hig...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_hypoxia
The second link doesn't mention timing except the standard 'five minutes' thing, while holding your breath for two minutes is probably going to lead to somewhere between 60 and 0 seconds of oxygen deprivation.
So I'm still unsure where the risk of dying comes from.
As far as I can tell most of the danger comes from the possibility of having someone hold you still while you panic, and that is not what I generally consider deadly.
Really not sure if I'm missing something...
No, it does not make sure of that, besides it said 'a couple' and not 'two' (depending on the person two might very well be enough to harm them, but some might interpret 'a couple' as being even more than two).
The person was suggested to be there to make sure you can't remove the bag yourself and by the time the bag is finally removed it may simply be too late.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choking_game
"Any activity that deprives the brain of oxygen has the potential to cause moderate to severe brain cell death leading to permanent loss of neurological function ranging from difficulty in concentration or loss of short term memory capacity through severe, lifelong mental disability to death."
Suggesting people do this is highly irresponsible, this is probably the dumbest sub-thread I've seen on HN in all the time that I've been here, which is especially annoying because the main thread is one of the best.
That cites source 12, which doesn't seem to support the critical "any activity" part of the sentence, at least in terms of how long the oxygen deprivation lasts.
>95.7% of these deaths occurred while the youth was alone
Seems to support my skepticism for a strictly-timed co-operative activity.
I'm not even sure you'd end up in oxygen deprivation at all within a couple minutes when you start with a nice big breath.
I'm sorry you think my question is dumb. I was just hoping to learn something. At this point I'm feeling reasonably confident that I wasn't unaware of important information, and 'dying' was strong hyperbole. I'll note again that I don't support actually doing it.
> Specifically to drowning there is also oxygen blood content difference - harder to detect from outside, yet an unmistakable indicator.
CO2 buildup should be a more reliable indicator.
Maybe that's not such a bad thing overall though.
Followed shortly thereafter by "I wonder where you get/how you generate a dataset of the vital signs of drowning children..."
panic attack data set will get you halfway there and panic attacks happen naturally and sufficiently frequently. Add the dataset from something like asthma attacks (unfortunately it is easy to obtain too).
There was also the coveted blue band, which you could only get by doing a very rigorous set of tests and passing junior lifeguard training. I had to swim who knows how many laps and tread water for like an hour, plus lift bricks up off the pool floor and various other lifeguard-related things. The blue bands were super "rare" and I realize now it was just an inventive way to encourage the kids to swim better and harder.
Not exactly the same bands you were talking about, but a cheaper alternative and a good way to keep control and prevent drownings before they happen.
Almost two decades passes. I'm in Bali, on a deserted beach with my ex because we "don't want the average experience" or whatever. A small argument and I decide I want a swim. I walk out through the surf, my mind overcome with thoughts of the pathetic argument. I don't think about the undulating sand beneath my feet, but I should. Not even 2 minutes into my swim and I'm out a good 200m. I've swam 10km before in the sea, I'm fit enough, but I had been in a bicycle accident and fractured my dominant arm just 8 weeks prior. My natural confidence, my training, my accolades had resulted in my taking an unknown sea for granted. I looked to the sure, my girlfriend had vanished, no doubt going to lick her wounds from our previous verbal exchange.
I can honestly say the human mind is a strange thing under pressure. I thought back to being 12 and outright laughing at the tourists (emits, slang for ants in Cornish) who died every year often through a mix of alcohol and poor planning. The realisation of such past hubris was overwhelming. I also realised that the people I knew from there would be laughing at my death. I was now well over 1km from shore. My mind kicked in properly, I started swimming hard normal to the rip tide. After 5 minutes of treading water and thinking hard some rocks where looking achievable, so I decided to give it all in the hope of getting there, a fast sprint was my plan and thankfully this worked.
If ever I thought I'd given 100% to a physical activity before I was mistaken. My legs bore the brunt of this assault, my upper-body was uncoordinated due to the cycling injury. My watch was telling me I had been hard going for barely 10 minutes. I was not even half the way, my fear I think allowed for adrenaline to kick in, I was at this point making peace with death of drowning, as an asthmatic a death that has always scared me.
I made it to the rocks and to my joy I didn't need to climb along them, the rip tide was no more. I made it to shore. A half hour swim that had been like no other I've ever had and I hope will ever have. I was so upset with my ex for leaving me. Not watching nor caring as I had asked and she agreed. Going into the unknown water without someone aware is folly and I thought she would be observing me. Anger and most likely just bordem resulted in her not doing so.
TLDR: I was a good swimmer, I still so very nearly killed myself. Knowing when someone is in trouble requires education.
Also, a back-float is always generally a good strategy in salt water conditions when you've lost control or strength to swim. You carry over common waves and it takes very little energy.
Honestly, it sounds like you panicked.
The parent does mention swimming against a rip current, which would explain the need to swim at maximum physical exertion for an extended period of time. In that case I don't think he panicked.
Huh? Why are people writing this? You don't swim against a rip current.
as an engineer, I assumed this ('normal') meant across/perpendicular/90 degrees to the rip tide, not against it ...
I believe 90 degrees to a rip tide is the correct thing to do ...
It's a really smart idea, and while even an excellent swimmer can become fatigued the more experienced ones will be less likely to need aid than the less experienced ones.
There's two things that such a device would need to have: quite low false positives (so that the lifeguard isn't distracted by false alarms - leading to a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario), and vanishingly small false negatives (the first time a kid dies because the device didn't work, it'll be a bad day). In-water RF would be very hard to do to make those two conditions true.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fabulous idea. Wearing my EE hat though, I haven't thought of a good way to do it that would work reliably enough for a life-saving device.
I was lying with my wife next to the pool, casually watching. A small boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, stepped to the ladder and climbed down into the water, in a completely confident, unspectacular way. With the water up to his neck, he did not start to swim, though, but just continued downwards, slowly to the ground of the basin. I loved to enter the pool this way as a little boy as well.
The boy made no movement underneath the water, at all. He just sank to the ground and that was it. There was nothing suspicious, and it took us some time to realize that he would not come back up. I would guess roughly two minutes. Then we and some people in the pool realized he was not moving for too long. The boy was quickly recovered, lifeguards rushed in and reanimated the boy. It was a remote location and it took the emergency doctors 15 minutes to arrive, in which the boy was puking, caughing and barking his soul out. His mother was just 10 meters away when it happened and had a complete nervous breakdown when they reanimated the child in front of her eyes.
So there was a happy end, but we were shocked to the bones that a child almost drowned in plain sight, 4 meters away from us, WHILE WE WERE WATCHING THE CHILD DROWN. The disturbing point was, that this child showed absolutely no signs of panic - he did not wave the arms, tried not to grab something, made no swimming movements with the legs, just nothing!
A few weeks later I was back in the same water park (which has a dozen of pools and slides) with a group of 7 boys in that age celebrating a birthday. I can tell you, I had no real fun that day, desperately trying to track the bunch and not loose them for a minute.
Did the boy do this intentionally? Did he go unconscious when entering the pool? Was he trying to stay under as long as he could? Why was he not moving at all on the way in?
<- Down-mods for relevant questions.
> it was such a pure horror
> a happy end
> it did not wave the arms
> made no swimming movements with the legs
> a dozen of pools and slides
> 7 boys in that age
> not loose them
None of these are a big deal, though, and the writing was perfectly understandable.
The drowning did not wave the arms?
Some people speak more than one language.
Besides, the story wasn't about a generic child, but a "small boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old" and was referred to with "his", "he", etc. multiple times.
We often use neuter (gender-neutral) pronouns in English, just not this one. I've heard native English speakers say things like "If a mother wants to use the nursing room, they can just key in the code in their pamphlet". There are definitely restrictions on using 'gender-neutral they' but this kind of usage is totally normal.
Which is a great sentence, because semantically the pronoun referent is obligatorily female and singular. And yet, we use 'they' in this context. Which shows (among other things) that syntactic requirements can be relatively divorced from semantics. C'mon, that's pretty cool, right?
My two cents.
As someone who speaks other languages, I know there's a point where it's hard to make progress because you are fluent enough to be understood easily and yet you make significant mistakes that nobody will bother to correct unless you ask.
He entered the pool, face to the stairs, hands on the rails, continued to climb until the ladder ended (with his head already under water), released the rails, and sank, vertically, until the bottom. It was not a very deep pool, maybe 1.70m or so. He seemed to stand there, as if trying to see how long he could keep his breath. And when he shifted out of the upright position it became obvious that he was in trouble. A man standing next grabbed him, pulled him up, saw the boy was unconscious, started to shout for help and within seconds the boy was out of the pool and the lifeguards took over.
It's just an interesting situation to think about, because how would you know? And, why wouldn't someone come up? Obviously he became unconscious at some point, but was it due to not being able to breathe? Or did something else happen to him as he was entering the water (eg. aneuyrsm, heart failure, etc). It's hard to believe it could have been an intentional act of the kid (suicide at 6? probably not very common) or that he would go into that part of the pool in the way you described without knowing how to swim.
A child who doesn't know how to swim but is copying what they see others doing might be breathing as normal, have exhaled recently, and when they release the handles/ladder and enter the pool begin to sink. Not knowing how to swim and now head-under-water they are unable to get air into their lungs to have any amount of buoyancy.
Depends on a number of factors -- body composition (fat is less dense), how much air you have in your lungs (did you inhale or exhale before entering the water), etc.
Having a tea party is much easier before you realize the danger consciously.
The reaction of babies is therefore perfectly adapted: stay calm, hold breath, wait until your lower density brings you back to the surface. Chaotic moves that counter this and burn your blood oxygen is actually what makes you drown yourself.
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-density-of-the-human-body
If you've got a lungful of air. Exhale first, and most people will sink like a stone.
My Dad had a trick, which I've done a few times myself as an adult, where he'd hyperventilate for a bit to get his blood heavily oxygenated, then exhale fully and just lie quietly on the bottom of the pool for a minute or so. (In the shallow end, so he only needed to stand up to breathe.) It's surprisingly soothing; after reading this thread, though, I'm not sure I'd do it at a public pool to avoid freaking out the lifeguard, and I certainly wouldn't teach any kids to do it.
(Floatation also depends a lot on your body fat percentage. Babies are very chubby, so they float, but I can imagine that a real lean kid in the middle of a growth spurt wouldn't be so buoyant.)
Edit: Ok it's a bad idea. I think I'd get PTSD if the guard didn't make the rescue.
I life-guarded for almost 10 years, the only way I would ever let anything that supported a human floating __besides__ an approved life jacket was if the pool was almost empty (such that the one person got my undivided attention) and if I knew the child to already be a strong swimmer.
I highly encourage everyone reading this to not swim at pools that allow floats of any kind besides a life jacket, even something as simple as water wings. [0] It encourages kids to go deeper than they should, and if they fall off they're in big trouble. It creates the possibility for a child to get trapped under someone else, and a life guard has almost no chance in that scenario.
95% of guarding is preventive.
Neat site though.
[0] Water wings can create the situation where a child has their head underwater and their arms up above water, but they can't pull themselves up.
That's what we use with our two year old son, though he's also only in pools with one-on-one attention. I'd prefer to just take him to shallower pools, but his feet just don't touch in any of our local pools, and puddle jumper seemed like a good option for him to have a little independent exploration in the water.
If the kid is determined enough, they can indeed come off.
[0] http://shopdolphin.dk/139h/images/35111.jpg
And thanks for watching other people's kids. Wage or not, that job can become real rewarding, especially once you are the humiliated and terrified parent.
I do not even let my kid walk around our community pool without it on!
I made one rescue after a little girl faceplanted from the high dive and came up crying and clearly struggling - the whole time I was helping her to the wall, I had her mom yelling at me from the pool deck that "she's fine, you're just scaring her!" I came away from that second-guessing myself - that maybe I SHOULDN'T have gone in after her, and that I should've just let it play out a little more - which is a really scary thing to second-guess.
At the end of the day you were the one sitting in the chair and had to make a judgement call based on your training and observations.
Think of this way - if you hadn't reacted as you did and the girl ended up injured or dead, how much worse would you feel today?
Other life guards dive into the deep end from the exhaust hatch in the ceiling after the pool is closed to the public.
I'm thankful for both types but I slightly favor the latter.
Needless to say I had to buy 2 umbrellas least my boss found out.
I always likes horsing around with the kids, when we developed a relationship such that they listened to the rules, which really wasn't asking a lot. Don't run, don't dunk people, get out when I ask you do (adult swim, thunder/lighting) and stay out of the deep end if you haven't passed the swim test.
There are boring guards, just like there are boring people. I have found that men and women (mostly teenagers at that point) who elect to hang out in their bathing suits (read: basically underwear) 40 hours a week are usually a lot of fun to be around. There is a specific sense of self-confidence that I never really thought about until replying to your comment.
When I jumped into the deep pool my floating equipment was pushed off. I panicked and struggled for my life until I somehow got to the side and then managed to get up by myself. And no-one noticed.
I stayed away from deep water until I could swim properly.
I also remember one year doing a lifeguarding merit badge where we did various things like tread water for an excessively long period of time, practice towing other people to shore, and even a bit where we had to jump into the water fully clothed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and learn how to float regardless (basically by inflating our shirt with air). That stuff was hard. Also one bit where we started on shore, fully-clothed including jeans, socks, laced-up boots, etc, and had to ditch as much clothing as possible and run into the water within an extremely short period of time (the idea being if we saw someone drowning, we had to be able to get in the water to effect a rescue as fast as possible).
[1] New England has a habit of calling large bodies of water "ponds" even though most other places would call them lakes
They later changed it to a gimme course because of "hazing" complaints, which I thought was awful.
> They later changed it to a gimme course
That sucks. I'm also kind of surprised to hear that, because BSA does not usually skimp on safety, and anyone with the lifeguarding merit badge should be capable of actually saving someone's life.
I swam two out of two and a half laps, but I didn't pace myself well enough, and I ended up having to stop. Partially, I was out of breath, partially, my shoulder was bothering me due to a healed fracture from a car accident last fall. First time I had done any significant amount of swimming since then and didn't realize how far from 100% I was. Was a bit embarrassing getting the "beginner" swim label, but I had to be a good role model and take my lumps.
Fatigue sets in quickly (and sometimes almost instantly). In my case it was a young girl who was a fine swimmer (on the swim team) and had been playing in the pool all day on a hot and crowded July day. She got a little far away from the wall in an area between 5-6 feet, very much like the video, and suddenly found herself struggling to break the surface of the water.
It happens fast, and can happen to kids you would never suspect would find themselves in trouble.
I am unable to view OP's site at the moment so I'm not sure if you mean there was something on top of her.
Anyway, in open water "being able to swim" should include a "rescue/recovery float" ability. AKA, the ability to float indefinitely with little or no expended effort (ideally no effort at all, but some people have body builds which make light sculling necessary). If they can't do that, they aren't ready to swim in deep water.
That is the standard we used when I was a lifeguard and swim instructor (well, instructor assistant).
No, there was no flotation device blocking the surface in any of the videos.
On a slightly more positive note, this is a clip from BBCs Fantastic The Human Body. It talks about and shows the natural abilities of babies to swim at a very early age. If you're politically correct/sensitive, you may want to skip it. It does show genitals. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fbSCSHzXkrI
They conflate 'can swim across shallow pool' with 'johnny can swim now, so I can relax'.
I had both my kids (currently 3 and 5) learn to swim by having them wear inflatable vests. When they started they had fully inflated vests. every week or so I would deflate it bit by bit, until they are wearing a fully deflated vest. At that point the vest is just for emotional support, and they can pretty much handle the water without drowning (though still need proper lessons of course)
What's to prevent a condom-like "99% success rate" as legal backing for "haha can't sue us if it fails because we didn't promise 100% success rate"? Even though, effectively and when used properly, they have a 100% success rate... it's just there for legal reasons to prevent lawsuits.
[0] http://www.hovding.com/
I assume that they are good as he uses them in his swimming classes and with it he can swim a few metres to the side of the pool.
On Amazon you can shop for flotation devices that are "Coast Guard Approved" specifically. I would highly recommend getting one that is.
If your child gets tired, this will not help. This looks like it forced the child into a face-down position, and a tired child forced to be face-down in water doesn't seem like a great idea.
As a fellow parent of a 1.5 year old, I'm sure you've heard of latent drowning. [0] This device seems like it could promote the chances of that happening as well.
[0] https://www.parentmap.com/article/how-a-child-can-drown-5-ho...
disclaimer: I'm not in any way a professional when it comes to water safety, so this is just a remark; not advice.
Warning: Not suitable for children under 36 months Warning: Only to be used in water in which the child is within its depth and under adult supervision Warning: To be used under the direct supervision of an adult
I don't think it's a mistake that "under adult supervision" is said twice.
Parents were angry at him for throwing their kids into the water. None of them even realized I had almost died. Not that I blame them though, it would probably look pretty funny to see a grown man knock 4 kids off some mats into the pool haha.
I was a pretty strong swimmer at that point, and more than a little lucky as well. I was able to collect my thoughts and get out.
I'm told I was only under there for about ten seconds, but my memory of it feels like about 2-3 minutes. It was easily the scariest thing that ever happened to me personally as a child.
[1]-Like this, but without the gap in the middle: http://www.aquacycleusa.com/aqua-cycle-swim-raft
Like people who do kayaking practice how to get out when the kayak turns upside down.
So for instance, I bought a fire extinguisher and used it up in some deserted bushes. It was a small expense, but now I'm fully aware how this particular type of extinguishers behave. Or when a friend wanted to buy mace (she was coming home late at night), we bought two and used up one for doing target practice, so that she's aware how the fluid stream behaves and how to aim it.
The biggest problem with this approach that I find is that there are so many things you could prepare yourself. Even if it usually would just take a few minutes and little to no expense, you can't train for things you don't realize exist as concepts or situations. For instance, thanks to this subthread it is the first time it occured to me that a situation like obstructed surface when diving in a pool can occur. I'm adding it to my mental list of things to prepare for when I get the opportunity.
Once you are calm, you can orient yourself by observing air bubbles for example, even in turbulent water.
Nobody died, which gave every person I guarded the opportunity to pursue an anti-boring life in whatever way they see fit.
There are a lot of ways to have fun at a pool without flotation devices that endanger lives. I can provide a list if you'd like.
You could introduce a rule that nobody can speak or make any noises that aren't a direct result of swimming, so that when someone is in trouble it's easier to hear them and/or someone else alerting to the problem.
Both of those would still be running the pool, both of them would make it easier to keep people from drowning, and it wouldn't be impossible to have fun. It would be much less fun, but not impossible.
But you've drawn a line that those rules would be going too far, whereas banning flotation devices isn't too far. You've balanced in your mind safety vs. entertainment to see what's worth doing and what isn't. I'm not arguing with your decisions, I know nothing about keeping swimmers safe, I'm just saying in response to "my job was to guard lives, not provide entertainment" that if you really didn't care about anything other than saving their lives you could be much stricter and make the pool much less fun, but a tiny bit more safe.
That said, if you're watching for them, I just sort of defocus to watch the whole pool at once and look for the particular splashes of the drowning person's "swim" that become distinctive after you've seen it enough times.
Less than 1000 deaths by drowning is a really small number in a country with tens of millions of children swimming every year.
I do volunteer work with my local surf live saving club, looking after the kids in the under 7 program. It is exhausting work standing in the surf watching 30-40 kids at once. Most parents see it as a child-minding surface and are content to sit way up on the beach with a coffee and a phone.
The point is the parents - in many if not the majority of cases - don't pay attention to their kids swimming abilities.
Sometimes I get cramps(? Not sure if right word?) In my legs that hamper my ability to swim. It scares me to think what I'd do if I had to swim in anything other than a small pond. I'm not a good swimmer to begin with.
I'll also say that I could find ~1000 families who are probably devastated every year, most likely any marriage that existed was challenged, and possibly broken up. Lives changed forever. Why? So some kid who can't swim could float in 6 feet of water for a few minutes.
Yes it is on parents as well. I am a parent. Fortunately I can swim well. I am not the parent that takes their child to the kiddie pool, and while I'm in the middle of a sneeze, my child takes off and jumps feet-first into the "big" pool, and I can't do anything to save them because I can't swim.
I'll agree 100% that the parents that showed up at my pool and took a 2 hour nap, those were bad parents. I woke them up when their child was misbehaving, and sometimes just because I was severely annoyed.. My guards were guards, not baby-sitters.
Perhaps my child is hanging out with friends, and one of the friends parents takes them all to the community pool. I'm not there. Is is still on me as a parent?
I understand and appreciate your comment. Life just isn't that simple sometimes.
My first comment was asking why most of the people were in those rubber things. If most of them can't swim, it is really dangerous for it calls for a high level of alertness on the life-guard part when the people shouldn't be there in the first place. And no, that's not really the job of the life-guard to watch over all of those.
That's like putting someone to watch over a large number of drunk people moving around and having fun in a porcelain shop and make sure none of them breaks anything.
A person unable to swim simply doesn't belong in a swimming pool deep enough that she can drown. She should be the exception rather than the norm.
I may seem dramatic, but this is really a bad thing waiting to happen. And it's already happening. If you couldn't spot the kids in that cluster-mess, that's bad news.
In my opinion, those who don't know yet how to swim should be in a pool of an appropriate depth. This is why you have different pools for swimmers and non-swimmers, or one pool with a gradient of depths.
Also the people responsible for the kid.. if the kid will be in the water unattended, the top priority is to make sure he's comfortable in the water (how to float, how to relax, etc).
Nobody should drown in a darn swimming pool! It's a darn swimming pool!
I have no lifeguarding experience nor education, but what you are saying seems important. Any known research or training practices for lifeguards that would support your claim? I could start a dialogue with our local pool with something like that.
Thanks
Approaching the 3/4 mark of the length, I felt it slipping out of my hands and in my panic, I went down. I woke up after being resuscitated after a lifeguard noticed I was in trouble under the water. He had jumped from the top step of his high chair straight in apparently and literally threw me out of the water to a waiting colleague.
Not sure if I'd trust my own children with that type of flotation aid again, but as you said, it encouraged me to swim outside of my comfort zone and I panicked so perhaps more control is needed of when and where it is used.
[0] http://runforthethrills.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/kick-...
Haven't seen it in action live though, just thought it was a cool piece of tech.
It definitely in the realm of possibilities. They're starting to do the camera assist in the checkout product theft prevention.
http://www.stoplift.com/how-it-works/
There may be solutions that are vastly superior to a human lifeguard.
Sure, someday we'll have robots do everything for us. We're not quite there yet.
You could even have an auto-drain feature if you desired.
This isn't to mention that automation does encourage complacency. One of the primary reasons for the recent Malaysia Air jet disappearances according to investigations is an excessive reliance upon automated systems to fly planes, and insufficient knowledge of flying without such tools. I reckon a similar situation could be a real danger here as well (if not amplified considerably; most lifeguards (at least where I've lived) were usually highschool students doing it as an extracurricular/volunteer activity, summer job, etc., and teenagers aren't exactly known for having an above-average attention span).
False positives can lead to death too. This article talks about alert fatigue that contributed to a fatal medication error at UCSF:
https://medium.com/backchannel/beware-of-the-robot-pharmacis...
I'd be wary of giving a lifeguard who might be straining to pay attention to n things an n+1th thing to pay attention to.
* with wristband (http://www.sealswimsafe.com/#!how-it-works/cok0)
* with underwater camera (http://www.poseidonsaveslives.com/ http://www.poolview.co.uk/swimeye/ http://www.angeleye.it/)