Heatwave water deaths - campaign required

I meant just randomly.
Tge last time we were there (last sumner) tgere were patrols stopping people without PFDs and being too far fron shore without a craft.

We stopped going because of too many family groups (and teens) drinking and nkt supervising small children.

We need something like the ~"Charlie says" safety warnings of the 1960s/1970s but where the young will see them. I was terrified of going near a pylon because Charlie said it was very dangerous.

Maybe big bill boards along roads by schools, or roads anywhere.

Campaigns CAN reach teenage boys. This one was quite successful, targeting the same group:

But there's no one single organisation that would fund it like there is on the railways. We need to go back to the good old days of public information films.

You must be allowed to swim at some point.

The best OW swimmers in the country do a 7.5k race there each July!

Maybe only organised swimming is allowed?

In a world where people are ignoring very clear warning signs, such as those at Hampstead Heath model boating pond, where “no swimming” and “nesting waterfowl” is clearly marked, I think something similar to the road safety campaign, showing the number of deaths last year on a sign shaped like a pedestrian (in this case, a swimmer) might do the trick…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_Heroic_Self-Sacrifice

Wiki link to Postmans Park memorial. Well worth a visit.

Often , that’s part of the issue. We tell kids they’re a good, competent swimmer , at stage whatever, good form, excellent stamina etc. Those all apply (mostly) to a controlled environment. Heated pool, no tides, no currents, nothing underwater, clear water , no waves , no dips etc.

There are signs at a lot of these places saying no swimming allowed. But kids, who unfortunately think they know better, just ignore them. Learning to swim isn't the issue as that isn't always the problem - it's cold water shock.

Agree. If ever you go to Postmans Park in London ( near the Barbican) there is a gallery of plaques commemorating people who have lost their lives trying to save others. A lot of them are young people who died trying to save others when swimming.

Young people, hot weather, cold water. Fatal combination.

For the under 50s:

Public Information Film voiced by Donald Pleasance as referenced by pps above.

It’s awful, tragic. Many of these people would consider themselves good swimmers, the water is extremely dangerous. Pool only for me.

There are many campaigns ATM though.TV)( RNLI ).Many adverts in billboards and SM .Point is its hot and people (esp teenage boys!) want to cool down and keep up with their mates . Not sure what elseyou can do

School. Regularly. Very regularly.
Doesn't stop them. Often parents know they are ‘off to swim in the lake’ too.
It’s not an information problem

The 80s was a completely different world from today's world. There was still discipline by parents and in schools. Crime was taken seriously, if you got caught shoplifting you were arrested and taken to court.
Knife culture was rarely heard of. Drugs were frowned upon and only hippies smoked weed.
Now its a free-for-all. Its all me me me, im entitled to kick your door off its hinges and harrass your grandparents if I want to and nothing will be done about it. Although use some "hurty wordz" and off to jail you go..Respect for your environment and your neighbours went down the toilet years ago

I am in my late 60s and cycle a lot, albeit slowly. I always get boys shouting "Do a wheelie for us gran". I haven't any idea how to do a wheelie.

We live in a fishing town with a marina. All along the public areas there are graphic signs reminding that there are hazards underwater that can't be seen from above and every hot sunny day you see teenage boys jumping off the dock into the sea right beside these signs. Various authorities go into the school to talk to the kids and show videos etc but none of them seem to take it in. Strangely it seems to be boys who jump off the dock - I've never seen girls do it.

@AnotherPidgey There does need to be awareness of how to be safer in water. Gentle entry to acclimatise is a big one. Check entry and exit points. Get your gasp in while your head is above water, not 6ft down from a jump. How to float. What drowning actually looks like. How to safely assist someone in danger. How to read water (particularly moving water near waterfalls and rivers; foamy water with air bubbles is less boyant aside from currents), spotting features like riptides.

Your whole post was great, but this bit is so important. Speaking for myself I wasn’t aware of the automatic ‘gasp’ response until I heard someone on the radio explaining it a few years ago. Jumping in is pretty much the worst thing you can do, but we don’t seem to have an inbuilt instinct against it.

It is utterly tragic to lose someone in this way. People claiming it didn’t happen in their childhood are forgetting that they were kids themselves at the time, so even if it made the news (and I suspect many drowning incidents actually didn’t) they wouldn’t necessarily have picked up on it.

Its an odd place... you arent allowed to swim, but you can paddleboard, kayak etc (wearing a PFD). Plus you are allowed tobfall off said craft. But you arent allowed to swim...

I did pyjama swimming in the early 1980s. Bronze lifesaving badge. you had to jump in wearing the pyjamas, tread water for a bit and take off the trousers and blow them up to make a float. You also had to retrieve a brick from the bottom of the pool.

I also swim at an unheated lido and don't envy the lifeguards there, who have to dive in at the start of every shift, so they're used to it if they have to rescue someone. <shiver>.

So the lack of parenting was actually even worse in the 80s and is of a better standard now?

The death toll this year already seems exceptionally high and we're not even into official summer yet.

I do think that "online/indoor/bedroom culture" is definitely factor. Young people simply aren't getting out as much as previous generations and gaining experience of the outdoors.

When I was a kid in the '70s our nearest swimming pool was 30 miles away and we would have a block of about 6 weeks in the summer term when we were bussed there once a week. Most of us learned to swim in the river or cycled to the loch about 5 miles away (about 10 miles long with a shallow sloping beach and a "bay" at the outflow end so the water had days to heat up).

But.

• These were the days of the scary Public Information ads, which we all saw as PP said, there were only 3 channels.

• There was a continuum of older kids and adults around who had done the same and could warn of the deeper and more dangerous bits.

• There were probably more near misses than we like to think but we learned from them. We used to play a game coming out of school where we would jump from rock to rock in the stream and my friend slipped and went in up to her waist. I had to take her home with me and dry her out in front of our gas fire so her stepdad didn't find out.

• And people still died. A boy in secondary drowned one summer in a loch (a higher, deeper, colder one than the one above) and a local man died swimming in yet a different loch after he'd been drinking.

I think the OP is right that we need a campaign targeted wherever young people get their information from. IMO Public Information ads should be brought back and it should be mandatory that YouTube/TikTok etc should have to show these as a proportion of unskippable ads.

If you aren't aware of the dangers of open water by now, I am afraid you will never be.

I just wanted to let you know OP that after reading this post I sat all of my children down and we watched several water safety videos together.

They all have lessons but I think there is still a lot of benefit about understanding the safety issues in different water environments.

Yeah my DS has this too!

My home town would have an annual hot weather drowning in the lakes, and back then it had a lido which was always rammed in hot weather in addition to the town's main swimming pool. This is not a new issue.

However currently access to swimming, especially casual, fun swimming is dire. If there is still a pool, "general swimming" time slots are typically a couple of 1hr slots per day in a timetable rammed with lane swimming, lessons and other specialist sessions and activities. Groups heading off to cool down near open water probably wouldn't divert to the leisure centre instead, but generally poor provision means poor skills and experience, and less likely to maintain swimming ability which is more likely to be a problem when in open water.

Younger teens as a cohort lost out on swimming access around the junior school years with Covid restrictions. My y10 15yo was fortunate to have just completed his school swimming in Feb 2020 which in his case was a useful compliment to private lessons and really gear-changed his ability. The now y9s of his school had a month before lockdown, and another month in the autumn between tiers and lockdowns. My y8 13yo's year lost half of their swimming provision to fill the gap of the year above and there was a noticable gap in entry level and outcome level between the two classes two years apart. This is a school where most have lessons and our slot was between two schools in deprived areas where the ratios of novice, improver and competent groups was wildly different, and in those schools the majority couldn't functionally swim by any meaningful description (e.g. doggy paddle 10m).
At the same time private lessons at best stopped and started with multiple changes in lockdowns/ tiers. Social distancing meant many pools just didn't run access to family swimming for well over a year. At my DC's pool you could private hire half a pool but the cost was prohibative. While my DCs did have interrupted access to lessons, they had no practical access to fun swimming for over 15 months.

Since 2022 increased energy and transport costs have prevented many schools from accessing swimming provision. Some now do a week or two with "pop-up pools" which will be of limited use. Many have just dropped it entirely. Costs to families have soared and what was once a subsidised cheap afternoon out is now prohibitively expensive. This does not bode well for the next cohort of teenagers in the next 5+ years.

Many children just fizzled out of lessons if they had themfrom 2020 and they are now teenagers with poor water skills and knowledge.

Meanwhile open water swimming is booming on social media. Teenagers won't be watching instructive videos from middle-aged women with tow floats and bright bobble hats, they'll be watching shorts/ tik toks of people ploughing in and having fun, much like the sunset over landmark hills trend that does nothing to promote the countryside code and good hiking skills.

Simply saying "no swimming" does not and has never worked. Sites that are relatively safe with good practice are lumped in with toxic quarries and weirs that have specific, inherent dangers. I can think of a few spots that would be better being renamed "bleach lake" and "sewerage falls" to actually put people off and accuately represent the hazard.

There does need to be awareness of how to be safer in water. Gentle entry to acclimatise is a big one. Check entry and exit points. Get your gasp in while your head is above water, not 6ft down from a jump. How to float. What drowning actually looks like. How to safely assist someone in danger. How to read water (particularly moving water near waterfalls and rivers; foamy water with air bubbles is less boyant aside from currents), spotting features like riptides.

I think this is beyond parents as too many parents don't have the knowledge and skills to pass it on, and it's a group-think issue that needs a proper campaign, resources into schools and use social media to access older teens after years of getting good awareness into their heads.