Скачать или смотреть Water Safety — The Basics (July 2024)

More on this Great Lakes-focused series via the NYSG news item, "On YouTube: Beach and Water Safety — Know Before You Go", https://seagrant.sunysb.edu/articles/....

Transcript:

Most people have this false sense of security that knowing how to swim is water safety, when simply put knowing how to swim is just knowing how to swim. Water safety is knowing what can cause hazards, what types of water bodies have hazards, and how to avoid or survive those hazards. So we need people to understand their true swimming ability.

On average in the Great Lakes, there's 87 drownings a year. Half of those drownings are just here in Lake Michigan.

Drowning is the leading cause of accidental death in children ages 1 to 4. That's why it's really important for parents to watch the water at all times, even when lifeguards are present.

If the weather's really nice it gets quite busy, so it is a little overwhelming when there are hundreds of people in the water and it's only two of us on stand and one lifeguard on break.

Whenever you go to the beach, you need to know that you may be on your own if there's a water emergency. If you are swimming at a beach that doesn't have lifeguards, we recommend that you bring U.S. Coast Guard approved properly fitted life jackets, not just for the children but also for the adults. If there's an emergency, if you have a life jacket on, you have a 99% survival rate in the Great Lakes.

Lifeguards can't be watching your children 100% of the time, so it's really important to designate someone as a water watcher, and a water watcher is a person who is dedicated to watching the water only — they don't have a phone, they don't have a book, they aren't talking to other adults, their only job is to watch the water. This way, you can catch something happening before it's too late because drowning is quick and it's silent and it can happen in an instant.

Drowning has been portrayed as lots of yelling and waving at the surface of the water, when in fact a drowning person cannot yell or wave for help. So a drowning person is just gasping for air just at the surface, it looks like they're treading water. If they're doing this, they will submerge in less than 1 minute. If we can get them out of the water and breathing in less than 2 minutes, it's about a 94% survival rate.

Lake Michigan can be a very dangerous lake. We want people to come enjoy, have fun, but we also want people to go home safe and together.