You also have to be very careful when multiple kids are in the pool. Sometimes a kid who is a great swimmer can drown when another kid starts panicking and climbs on top of them to stay afloat.
She was panicking next to me in the pool all of a sudden and climbed on top of me. She wasn't heavy but her human effort to grab and exert pressure to use me as a float to stay above water forced me under. It was hard to get back up for air, and very sudden to which I didn't have a ton of air to begin with.
I remembered training, which was to pull the victim down with you to short circuit their brain into letting go, and it worked. I was able to swim out from her area, surface, catch a breath, and go help her to the shallow end.
That's exactly how I was taught as part of lifesaving training along with the most effective way of swimming (and 'towing') the person to safety. BTW, that was many decades ago (presumably things haven't changed much since then). .
Maybe it is just that most have 4 legs and that helps, but I'd guess monkeys know how to swim too. Not sure. I mean even snakes know how to swim haha.
What makes people so bad at swimming? Our big heads?
I don't think humans are really bad at swimming, we just panic and splash around instead of kicking our feet like any other animal does.
I never learned and never found the time to. But I'm pretty good at video games :)
You can ban all fun or tell parents to use common sense and have a backup for idiot parents.
In this specific pool I would also create a barrier/line between the shallow bit of the pool and the deep end. In some of the videos the kids end up in the deep end by just playing, even without the floating devices.
Also kids should be taught to swim at a young age. At least where I'm from there are many places where kids can fall into the water.
Except for the drowning
Issit sad if a kid dies? Sure. Doesn't man you should isolate them from anything that could potentially harm them, as such babying is also harmful over the long run.
It should be your choice to wear one.
If your kid can't swim, it's your job to teach them or keep them safe. If you're not doing that, should it not be on you, that Childs parent, to deal with it?
Where does personal responsibility start, and social intervention begin? Autonomy, responsibility, individuality are the things that should be under discussion... Not save the children.
You might think that's harsh but add in privacy to the above list, and make the topic "searching all your pictures for CP" (as some laws are attempting to do) it suddenly becomes over-reach.
WHy is it your job, or any one else's, to tell someone what they should do for their own good?
Cars are unsafe we should ban them. People might drown we should mandate swimming lessons...
It's an arbitrary line, and why is one different than any other?
The line isn't quiet as arbitrary as you make it sound. Itd be a different story if your health insurance wouldn't have to pay if you didn't wear it etc. There is also the extra inconvenience of having the road blocked for extended periods of time whenever someone offs themselves etc.
Pretty much every personal safety regulation happens because other people are getting impacted/inconvenienced in some way
That is needless. Suffering a tiny little bit from losing the option to play with floatation devices is still suffering.
Floats in public pools are a Bad Thing, I completely agree.
Source: lifeguard through highschool and college.
Source: fun police in high school and now have young children -- highly supervised pools are a bummer.
And the rules are mostly, don’t run, don’t dunk someone else.
For some reason (I think someone dived just in front of me), I needed to stop swimming and ended "vertical" in the water. It was quite unusual for me at the time. For a moment, I tried to go back to swim horizontally on the belly, without success. Then tried on the back, no success either. After a few tries, I began panicking like it is said the the video: I was just climbing an invisible ladder... A guard finally helped me reach the border of the pool and that was over.
After that, I tried to put me under the same circumstances: vertical in the water, 2 m from the border. And then convert to horizontal swimming. Every time it was easy. To this day, I still have no clue why I was not able to do that
i'll just comment my comment here instead of crapping up the entire thread. I went through about 20 videos and only missed two because the site assured me the person who the lifeguard rescued was "splashing around". My median time was -5s, with an upper bound (probably site limited) of -15s. The videos are just a toy, though. You know someone is going to need rescue, and probably about 10 seconds in. I was picking the people who looked like they'd need help. I'd make a great lifeguard but it would be because i'd point and yell at people to get out of the deep end 30 seconds before they even had any issues.
I learned to swim at 5-8 or so, and from 10-15 we spent summers swimming in the pacific ocean. I never had to be rescued during that time. I went swimming with a bunch of friends at Huntington Beach directly after a sewage leak into the ocean near there and they had put bleach into the water. I have asthma, so when i crossed the "can't touch the ground" part of the undertow and had an asthma attack, i yelled at a friend "get a lifeguard, i won't be able to get back to shore" - he relayed that on and then came to make sure i didn't "freak out". The lifeguard did have to tow dead weight, though, i couldn't move due to lack of breathing - not breathing water.
It is good to know that i can watch a decent sized group of people in inner tubes swimming and notice if one is struggling.
That's how it works in the Netherlands. Kids get level A first, then B etc. They must pass the test at the end. Level A is basically normal above water swimming. B requires certain distances of under water swimming. Higher levels include swimming with full clothes on and swimming out from under a larger plastic thing with a hole they "fell through" to simulate typical water emergencies.
What's really crazy is how easy the minimum requirements even for Red Cross lifeguard training are. When I did it, the "hardest" swimming qual was something like swimming 500 meters. That really should be table stakes for merely calling yourself a swimmer.
I used to swim for my high school team. I learned to hate pools. Now I want to get back to vary the physical activity (thanks god for the headsets you can wear in the water)
500m is what I plan to ultimately do, for many people who "can swim" this is already a lot.
It's much more strenuous and far fewer people make it through, thanks in part to the physical requirements.
Organizations like BSA have different courses and tend to certify their members by different levels for what privileges they have in the water. The Red Cross and YMCA have the most recognized certifications, mostly for their lifeguard courses.
If you want a good idea of how much of a joke the standards are in the US, the basic test to be in the Navy is only a deep water jump, 50 yard swim, and 5 minutes prone float. Most other branches don't even have a swim test requirement.
Maybe you should stop being a dick.
Only exception is during swimming lessons, and those are with a swimming instructor right there with them in the water.
Even if your kid is capable, most people don’t hesitate to throw one on just in case.
I was brought up in Australia and I was taught to swim earlier than I can remember. My mother would take me to the beach grab hold of my swimming costume from behind and get me to dog-paddle around the age I learned to walk. This was not unusual when I was growing up, most of the kids at school were reasonably good swimmers by the age of eight.
Also, early on we were taught to recognize rip currents and told to keep well away from them—they looked seductively harmless but are in fact very dangerous.
When I was about seven we moved to a country town about 100 miles or so from the beach but it had a swimming pool. There too the kids were good swimmers, much better than I expected as they had grown up without access to a beach.
That background leads me to my point: whenever we hear of someone being drowned at our beaches and rivers it is so often either a vising tourist or some migrant who was born overseas and did not learn to swim at an early age. For local people of my generation who were brought up as I was this cultural difference is striking obvious.
Come the era of civil rights a good number of these pools were closed down and filled in rather than allow mixed race swimming.
"White flight", redlining, and other economic pressures worked to keep new community pools coming into place in black neighbourhoods.
https://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/stories/2019/07/wolcott-segreg...
> and black families were generally less able to afford paid swimming lessons for their children.
Nearly everbody I know swims, black, white, etc. but I'm not sure very many had paid swimming lessons.
With accessable pools and beaches the swimming part comes along with people being in the water.
If their fear kept them away from water forever, it would serve them well enough I guess... the problem is, if you don't get kids swimming young then when they get older they will probably push through the fear on their own to fit in during social situation rather than in an instructional context where somebody is prepared to help them through the learning process safely. That's how you get teenagers jumping into pools during pool parties and immediately starting to drown.
At what age did the training start? I reckon training must have started far too late (read my comment about me getting used to the water about the same time I learned to walk).
I've not thought about it before because over here one just assumes someone can swim (with the caveat/possible exception of some tourists and migrants).
You'd think the first step in solving the problem would be to figure out why kids here take easily to water and the ones your way less so. Perhaps the answer is known and I've just not heard about it.
I understand how the lack of amenities, public pools etc., would seriously disadvantage kids and would set back their leaning to swim. What is less clear is why families would actually need to pay for swimming lessons. When I was growing up in Australia swimming was so ubiquitous that what we kids didn't learn from our parents we almost picked up by osmosis — immersion with other kids in the water, etc.
That's not to say kids weren't taught, they were but by that time most kids already had basic water skills, dog-paddling, treading water etc. Thus teaching was aimed at perfecting the correct stroke for the different swimming styles, the crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, sidestroke, etc. and it was taught at school. The thought of paying for swimming lessons would have been completely foreign to most of us (professional swimming teachers would have been reserved for those in competition such as the Olympics).
Why isn't swimming a compulsory part of school sport? If it were then all kids would be taught at least the basics.
>>Every day, there are nearly 10 accidental drownings in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s 3,500 people every year who die in water. Within these numbers is a startling fact: the fatal-drowning rate of Black/African-American children is three times higher than white children.
Careful, your source says that the rate, not the number, is 3x. There are some stats where it is actually 3x the raw number, in which case you know you have found a really crazy disparity given different group sizes.
> The district counters that the old model of cohort schools for highly capable students is highly inequitable. For decades, highly capable programs across the country, like SPS’, served a small number of Black, Latino, Indigenous, Alaskan and Pacific Islander and low-income students and taught more white and Asian students. In the 2022-23 school year, 52% of highly capable students at SPS were white, 16% were Asian, and 3.4% were Black.
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-publi...
We never let shirts into the pool, and then you made a mental note to watch for that person. Realistically, though, you spent much more time fishing out the confident , in-shape (or at least not fat) kids who bee-lined for the diving boards without any apparent plan for the time starting after they hit the water.
But lifeguards somehow find each other, and I knew several who worked at the local waterpark, and their jobs were way, way harder. No deaths during that time, but a lot of close calls. It's quite a thing to be 16-17 and have that pattern recognition stored, and it sticks with you.
Well worth the time to watch these videos. It's not quite the same, but it's close enough.
We have three kids and I struggle to watch videos of stuff like this.
No drownings in the family, thank $deity, but we've had a fairly lengthy string of medical incidents over the years.
Let's just say I could probably find my way to and around both our local hospital, and the big city hospital an hour away, while blindfolded.
People say all sorts of stupid stuff that they don’t intend to be disrespectful but which is. When it’s pointed out by someone the appropriate response is to change your behavior, not double down and make excuses.
Here’s another example: In my state (MN) it’s not uncommon for (largely) women to refer to themselves as hunting widows when their spouses go away for the weekend to hunt during the season. They say it as a joke but it’s disrespectful and diminishing to actual widows. How do I know? I’ve been widowed.
I couldn't do it in an emergency unless somehow i was in 100% beta brainwave mode (i think), but it isn't really hyperbole. Obviously if a deer or a tree or a brick or something was in the road i'd run straight into it, but that happens tops (TOPS!) two, maybe three times a week.
ETA: also if you've ever seen military vehicles with their no-show lights, it's not hard to fathom that some people can drive with next to no visual clues.
Actually, the HN response is to reflexively hit downvote to silence the blind guy, to keep the world of the offender clean and nice. I kind of expected better from the "Hacker Community", however, I continue to learn that I am pretty fuckin naiv.
Watched a couple of videos. I made the mistake of focusing too much on kids playing with the head underwater and lingering on them. You really have to focus everywhere.
But damn the life guards seem good.
I haven't watched all of them. So far no one has drowned. For a variety of ethical and legal reasons I very much doubt any reputable organisation would put a video of a fatal drowning on their site.
The app seems to be timing your response relative to response of a lifeguard: negative seconds if you noticed before a lifeguard jumps into the water, otherwise positive.
I think they recognize some of the kids and are on alert-- in at least one video, the lifeguard jumps in a mere 2 seconds after the kid slides off the float, and there are others that are similarly fast. Of course, it could also be that they happened to be looking at just the right time. However, in the 2-second one, the lifeguard turns to look at someone below them who splashes, then turns straight back to the section of the pool with the kid who then slides off, and in she jumps.
In some cases I would guess that they either know the regular kids, or they've been watching and gradually adding/removing kids from a mental list of high-risk candidates to keep an eye on. In other words, their excellent response times are aided by both their ability to recognize the signs as well as context gained throughout the summer or that day.
This would be a lot more interesting if there were videos where the lifeguard did not need to jump in, or where you had to pick within 4 or 5 seconds who you thought would need rescuing - the site didn't support this, per the "2 second" style ones i was clicking the obvious child repeatedly before the "game" decided to score it.
I was once called out by a lifeguard about that, as I was just chilling there enjoying my own stillness in a moment of zen; the lifeguard essentially pointed out that for them it was a false positive they had to weed out, and if I wanted to be helpful I could still enjoy zenness but assume a slightly different position that made it a bit more obvious I was not a case of drowning.
Of course we saved energy by being perfectly still and 'floating' beneath the pool's metal entrance stair case — as opposed to wasting energy pushing our bodies downwards.
Let's just say the lifeguard didn't like this method.
I'm going to be a parent in a few months. I hope my kid takes to the water like I did, but would prefer their interests in water activities aren't quite as nerve wracking.
"That's why we have lifeguards."
Etc. They probably don't know any better - that's how they learned to "swim" and they didn't die, so here we are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownproofing
[1] https://www.isye.gatech.edu/news/surviving-drownproofing-101
At minimum, I'd love to see survival swimming, treading water, basic pool safety in kindergarten (age 5).
We could also add the above to Head Start - that gets pool safety done earlier for disadvantaged kids (who are less likely to get it from their parents). Most of my peers start pool activities when their kids are infants and continue through swim team in primary school, but that's a very middle-class thing and costs a good bit of money/time.
> All children should be able to swim 25m by the end of primary school
https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2021/07/13/did-you-know-swi...
Pretty sure that's how it works in most countries that have public swimming education.
Perhaps I'm biased from growing up in a coastal town where swimming was a very popular competitive sport and lots of people had boats, but teaching kids in middle or high school is WAY too late IMO, this stuff needs to be taught at a much younger age - like 4-5 years of age.
source: I was once the only person, out of plenty adults outside a pool watching, to notice that one of the two people in the pool was struggling to keep their head up. This includes the kid’s mom, who was giving the kid vaguely encouraging suggestions from outside the pool. I thought it was obvious, apparently no one else around did, and I’ve never had any lifeguard training.
Interestingly, the other person in the pool was the kid’s older brother. He also thought the kid needed rescuing, but he wasn’t nearly a good enough swimmer to help, and he was starting to get into trouble himself by trying to help pull the kid to the side of the pool.
In the Bay Area (and the West Coast of North America in general), people should be aware of the existence and hazards of sneaker waves as well as the general hazards of large sections of beautiful coastline. The Bay Area and, especially, areas near and north of the Golden Gate, have some infamously dangerous beaches that look inviting and should absolutely not be used for swimming.
I get why people get into trouble. I do think the advice to Don't Panic might sink in more easily if rip currents weren't generally talked about like they're instant death.
I've inadvertently floated into one a few times. Once, with a friend who was a better swimmer than I was - I can't remember whether he said it or I did - the moment he grokked that we were in a rip current he started to panic like we were definitely going to drown. Once he calmed down we easily swam out of it.
The real danger is that someone who isn't a confident swimmer will be pulled out of their depth, or that someone who may be will end up in waves they're not capable of handling. In both cases, realistic skill assessment and a conservative approach is key. Poor swimmers use floatation. No one swims when the waves are more than they can manage. Follow those rules, and rip currents needn't be scary, and can even be fun.
If the rip current pulls you into a big current that takes you away from the beach, you might have a problem. If you’re a beginning swimmer who can’t swim a few hundred feet in open water, then you may also have a problem. If you have a boogie board, and you rely on it, and you lose the boogie board, you may also have a problem.
Many of the swimmers at your average tourist beach are not competent open water swimmers and may be helpless even 50 feet out. A rip current is a severe hazard for them.
I'm a reasonably strong swimmer, and played in the surf for most of my young life - which is exactly why I often stay on the beach looking like a fuddy-duddy to a lot of people who don't realize what they're (potentially) getting themselves into.
Sneaker waves are among the unusual location-specific risks that are why one should research the specific beach before playing there.
For the record, I watched a young girl start to drown. She walked out a little too far and couldn't touch the bottom anymore. She kept trying to bounce up and get breaths of air but couldn't keep her head above the water for long. There was no splashing, and she couldn't call out for help properly because she was barely getting enough air.
I don't think anybody other than me noticed it happening until I rushed out to save her.
Understandable. Maybe it helps if I tell you that no one dies in the videos. They are all rescued by a lifeguard.
There is this article which describes the same content: https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/rescuing-drowning-child...
But if you just want the gist of it: Drowning people can't shout for help. They can't raise their arms and wave. They typically spread their arms forward on the surface of the water and kind of bob up and down, but their mouth and nose doesn't go above the water long enough to finish a complete breath in-out cycle.
Someone drowning isn't at all like pictured in movies. Those videos aim to dispel that, and maybe teach you some of the signs of someone drowning, and also that you should watch your kids closely when they're at the pool.
First two refreshes of the page loaded it so I thought it was the fixed first video
In my case, it started with a video that appears to be broken (?) the video just ended without any life guard reaction, but you can hit "Play Another Video" which appears afterwards.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22482731 (4 years ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9962185 (9 years ago)
also OP posted same link 2 days ago.
Spot the Drowning Child - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26122952 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
Spot the Drowning Child (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22482731 - March 2020 (405 comments)
Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9962185 - July 2015 (378 comments)
---
Btw, on a couple other points:
> also OP posted same link 2 days ago
It was the same link; it just got picked for the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it got a random placement on HN's front page.
> sufficient conversation
Reposts are fine on HN after a year or so! This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
.. there is a description below the video, which seems helpful, if you ever want to spot drowning children
edit: at the end of the video a lifeguard swims to the drowning child
You ever swim with clothes on? Like a pair of jeans? It's way harder, way more energy gets expended to stay above water. Even with knowing how to swim, having a reduced ability to float can be incredibly dangerous.
I did find a couple where you could tell which kid was going to be in trouble long before it'd let you click them, which I found interesting.