A recent summer evening started the way many of our summer evenings do—after dinner, we walked down to the public beach for a relaxing swim to cool off and a hot summer day was over.
Lifeguards were going home for the day well past the time and the beach was still full of people. A family, one adult and three kids under the age of five, was in the water near us.
I knew twenty minutes before I would do a rescue. I’ve seen all the risk factors come in, so I decided to stay in the water just in case. I’ve done a good thing.
I could tell the children I didn’t know how to swim in that family. They didn’t like getting their face wet and when they fell into knee-deep water they had difficulty getting back up. With their free arm, the parent in the water scooped up the older children from time to time. The other parent watched the rest of the family, fully clothed, from a nearby dock.
The family then moved outside the line of the buoy. It may have been my lifeguard instinct, maybe it was my mom’s inner bear, but I was told to move closer.
Ultimately, I looked around the dock corner and saw one of the kids drowning. No more than a foot away was the parent in the water, but turned their back. The dock parent looked at their child but did not recognize that they were in distress.
I walked up to the kid, scooping her up. After listening to her cry and scream while holding her parent’s arms tightly, I was pleased to see that she was fully aware and breathing fine.
It might have been a lot worse. Five more seconds and I’d be doing a recovery of a submerged victim.
Supervision, lifejackets are key
You cannot take your eye off your kids for more than 15 seconds when you are supervising them in the water. A non-swimmer is not going to call for assistance. They don’t flail their arms. They often go unrecognized or people think they play in the water.
They use all the air they left to stay alive. Their entire body is up to their eyebrows under the water. Even if you’re 30 centimeters from your child, you won’t hear them sink to the bottom of the pool if they’re behind you.
If you have kids under six, put on them a life jacket as soon as you get to the beach or pool and don’t take it off.
Even if sandcastles are being built.
Even if 250 swimming lessons have been done.
Young children do not have the strength or coordination or emotional maturity needed to swim in an emergency situation on their own. When you choose to swim and when you need to be different sets of skills.
All of us are perfectly imperfect. We’re all the best parent we can do every day. All of us are making mistakes. For perfectly imperfect humans, children in lifejackets are the safety net.
Make sure you’re up to date with your CPR certification. Everything ended fine on that Saturday, but last summer I was involved in a rescue where we performed CPR for several minutes on a 24-year-old woman after drowning before she started breathing on her own again.
After just four minutes without oxygen, the brain begins to die. The average response time for an ambulance in the Laurentians, where I live, is 20 minutes. As citizens, by doing CPR, we must fill that 16-minute gap in order to save lives.
When I noticed the risk factors for the near-drowning falling into place, I was in the middle of wrangling my four kids to go home. It was my 10th time that I asked them to “Please come now!” I’m happy that when asked, my kids didn’t come. These extra minutes at the beach put us at the right place to save a life at the right time.
In 2015, 423 people drowned unintentionally in Canadian waters, according to the 2018 Canadian Drowning Report. Over the last 20 years, the rate of unintentional drowning deaths in Canada has gone down — 2.2 per 100,000 people in the early 1990s vs. 1.3 per 100,000 people between 2011 and 2015.
