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Automated Pool System Saves Swimmer
An anonymous reader writes "An automated swimmer tracking system installed in a pool in Wales has saved a young girl who just collapsed and sank to the bottom, by paging lifeguards when it could not detect her moving." This is the first time a UK swimmer has been saved by the £65,000 Poseidon system since it was installed in March of 2003.
Another link with video and more details. As the father of a two-year-old daughter, watching the girl sink to the bottom of the pool, completely motionless for a minute or so, and then be rescued invoked more emotion in me than I would have believed possible. I would say this one incident more than justified the $118,000 price tag.
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The article stated that the pool was busy and that she jumped in and never came up, she passed out as she was entering the water. No scream, no splashing or struggling, just girl jumps in and doesn't come up out of the water.
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TFA says that it's deeper than usual, due to the diving boards, and that there were a lot of surface swimmers which obscure what's happening that deep.
Or the lifeguards can just pay attention? Isnt that what they are paid for?
I spent the first few years of college as a lifeguard for the city and county. Sure, a lifeguard pays attention, but when the city is short staffed due to the budget and there is 1 lifeguard for, say, every 45 kids at the pool, it's hard to watch them all at the same time.
Combine that with the fact that this is a job where you are paying just a couple bucks more an hour than min. wage to ensure you child does not die. And, like so many other services, parents just treat the city pool like a babysitter.
Honestly, I left because (despite what Baywatch will tell you) it's a reasonably high stress job, for such low pay.
I might look at one kid down in the pool among the 100+ other kids in my section to guard. Is that kid practicing floating? Is he playing dead with his friends? Should I blow my whistle and make a save? Maybe he's just trying new goggles underwater. Do I risk that? What if I'm wrong? Combine that with the fact that IF a child were to die, the parent would sue you and everyone above you all the way to the mayor.
These are the millions of things that go through your mind every few minutes when you are watching a pool. In the 2 years I was there, I only had to save 1 kid. And it was due to parent neglect: a mother let her infant walk into the shallow end of the pool. As soon as the kid tripped in the water, he was no longer able to regain his footing and was floating face down in the pool!) After the end of that season, I traded in my buoy for a keyboard.
So it's not always as clear as to "just look at the water."
-Valiss
No scream, no splashing or struggling, just girl jumps in and doesn't come up out of the water.
Funny enough, that's usually what happens, since most people in distress either can't swim or have a medical problem that prevents them from doing so.
The non-swimmers are the most interesting. In lifeguard training, we watched a video of swimmers in distress taken at a water park. It turns out that something like 1/3 of the people who go there can't swim, and they still use the big slides that dump you into six feet of water! Lifeguards were making more than ten saves every day...so it was a perfect place to get video.
You'd be surprised how quiet they are. They're not bothered to scream or shout - they're mostly trying to breathe. They move very little, splash very little, kick straight down, do dumb, ineffective things with their arms.... The quiet, animalistic panic just before drowning is a little eerie to watch.
If someone is treading water and shouting "HELP!" he's probably fine, in other words. For the moment, anyway.
Any lifeguard worth his salt would be watching young people in the deep end, especially those underwater. The lifeguard on duty may have been doing that, in fact, and would have just waited longer than the Poseidon system did. The article doesn't say whether the lifeguard was tracking the girl already.
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Rescues can be dangerous. Alerting a weak swimmer near to someone fighting for their life would essentially result in two people drowning. The weak swimmer would approach the drowning victim, be grabbed, and pulled underwater as the drowning victim pulls/pushes themselves upwards for air. That's how I see a conscious scenario working out.
In a scenario like this one, pulling them up improperly would likely result in a lot of extra water in the lungs. This makes resuscitation significantly more difficult. A proper rescue would cover the mouth and nose and tilt the face downwards as they're raised to the surface.
If the victim was injured in a such a way that a spinal injury was incurred, having an untrained patron grabbing them could result in paralysation.
Untrained patrons may also find themselves ill-prepared to deal with other conditions such as seizures.
Not to mention the legal ramifications of this. If a patron was at all injured or traumatized by being in a situation where the facility placed a moral obligation for them to help on their shoulders, there's the potential for an ugly law-suit.
All in all, I think alerting the lifeguards to these alerts is adequate. There should always be lifeguards available to respond to an emergency. When there is limited staffing available to respond to emergencies, the pool is closed. That's standard. Bring public into a sketchy situation is something I would, as a lifeguard, be very hesitant to see.
Just keep in mind not everyone can swim. Not everyone lives near a beach. Not everyone is from a part of the world where swimming is particularly common. Many aquatic dangers are not obvious if you haven't grown up around water. Work in Vancouver for a few years and you'll get a pretty good idea of how swimming abilities range in various countries. I'm not bashing them. I'm just saying swimming abilities and water safety skills range greatly.