Heatwave water deaths - campaign required

[aurpod1980]

I saw the tragic news of two more lives lost in the heatwave, in water.

I believe there needs to be some sort of National campaign to warn people of the dangers of open water on hot days - or any day.

so many lives lost.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0p7j3lwepo

This is a good idea, and a related comment 'Our kids can swim 25m in winter coat and boots by the time they're 7. Almost everyone does swim lessons because it's viewed as terrible parenting not to, and their kids aren't allowed on school trips etc if they haven't passed their swim exam' can you imagine the outcry in the UK if they tried to do that here?

They'd be endless AIBUs 'AIBU to not make my DC do outdoor swimming lessons' with endless reasons why they can't do it.

But I think they should have lessons where they swim outside and also learn of the dangers. Plus there should be safety videos on Tiktok that are compulsory - you can't play other videos until you've let it run. Like unskippable adverts. Perhaps see if they can rope in some celebrities who teens admire - footballers, musicians etc.

There are campaigns. Every summer middle aged people pontificate online about cold water shock and how terrifying the water is like they’ve just learned about it themselves. It’s a really strange phenomenon

My partner grew up in a coastal town in the 90s and 2000s. Everyone managed to swim and enjoy the sea without getting into any trouble. People today seem to have an "I'll do what I like, the rules don't appy to me" attitude.

I do think some ego comes into play, here. Rules don't apply to them, etc. There are plenty of warnings, and parents should also provide education.

In the 80s we had the terrifying public information films (adverts) and they shocked (most of) us into behaving, but our parents had already done the groundwork with us.

Cold water shock is very different from person to person.

i have been doing open water swimming throughout the year for the last three years.

how shocked your body is by cold water is a very very individual thing.

in addition even at relatively high water temperatures (20 or so) if you are in for a long time (hours or longer) you will get tired.

kids and teens tend to be more vulnerable to cold water because bluntly they don’t have much fat and get cold quickly but also if you get in slowly (like at a beach) and let your body adjust slowly you are less likely to feel it.

i swim in the winter and because my body is now mostly used to it I can manage quite a long swim at 5 degrees or so but I certainly wouldn’t be recommending that someone who isn’t used to it swim at that temperature

I agree that a hard hitting short video on TikTok, etc. would be the best way of reaching teenagers although there will always be some that ignore it all.

I have no idea who is the biggest 'celebrity' teenage lads look up to these days (?) but if they could be the ones to tell them how stupid it is to jump into open water then this might make a few of them think twice.

I assumed there had been in schools, my DC have all been taught about it in assemblies anyway. Some teens near us jumped into a canal and died a few years ago so I believe one of the parents came in to do a talk.

Exactly this - take the campaign to where the audience is: gaming, you tube shorts, TikTok.

Since the government got rid of the COI in the noughties, official communication has been so ineffective.

This. This is the significant issue about getting through.

Exactly. We get heatwaves, always have done. The issue is the number, duration and intensity is all increasing through climate change. Anyone south and east of Birmingham, you have my sympathy. Some of the long range temperature statistics for places like London are frightening (let alone the follow on of dying greenspaces, wildfires increasing, water drying up etc....)

I swim all year round.

I often swim in a quarry that is used by a watersports centre. Swimming there is organised but as swimmers we have a lot of independence because we seem when it is unmanned, before and after their watersports activities. We do it safely, have rules about water temperatures and so on.

This week I took my 14 year old too.

Kids do need to learn about how to open water swim because they will do it regardless. They need to know how to float to live. They need to know to enter water slowly and acclimatise before getting out and jumping in. You can't ban open water swimming, all you do is stop people knowing how to reduce risk.

My school is near a river with a bridge that kids jump off.

Every year we have the fire brigade come into school to do assemblies on water safety. It's a hard-hitting assembly where they talk about the dead children they have pulled out of the river and how it has affected their families.

Kids still jump off the bridge.

I've been worried about them all half term as before we broke up they were talking about going down to the river and I warned them to stay safe but knew they'd pay no attention.

That sounds very stressful.

At my school we already cover this in PSHE lessons, I expect most schools do, but there is a big difference between listening in a lesson and taking that learning out into the real world when faced with peer pressure to do something, especially as a teenage boy.

It’s the same with level
crossing’s on the railway
dont cross when the lights are flashing or the barriers are coming down, so many have to chance it so that their not inconvenienced for 2 mins. And red lights for that matter

Oh but it is.

when I was growing up I don’t recall seeing multiple stories of teenagers drowning in lakes during heatwaves. As kids we would use our common sense and have water fights on the green or go to our friends with the big paddling pool. I was lucky enough to live nearby several houses with their own pools and spent summers with friends having a blast whilst our parents would be at work. Nobody drowned or got injured then.

it’s not just the drowning incidents, it’s the whole attitude of them in today’s age as a hole.

I refuse to go into town during the holidays or after school finishes because it’s just full of teens wearing balaclavas ( even in this hot weather) tormenting shoppers and shop keepers for no reason at all. I was driving through town a few weeks ago and was greeted by 20-25 masked youths, all with alcohol riding bikes all in the road coming towards oncoming traffic. They just do not give a shift at all. I later saw on social media they were running through the town throwing bricks at shop windows and attempting to purchase alcohol from pubs.

Did this happen in your childhood?!

I dare say that in some schools it’s a cultural thing. The parents can’t swim, the mothers would never want to be seen in a swimming costume and are nervous of the water anyway, so kids are never taken to a public pool.

Yes, I know there are also native British families where the parents never learned to swim, so are unlikely to take their dcs as a family activity. Plus there’s the expense factor, and non-school swimming lessons aren’t cheap.

My Gdcs’ primary provides swimming lessons in year 3, but IIRC they continue after Y3 only for those who still can’t swim to a certain standard.

Most lakes and rivers in the UK are inherently dangerous. Sewage, blue-green algae and rubbish under the surface eg shopping trolleys dumped. Don't forget reservoirs. Most young people don't risk assess cold, depth and currents despite annual campaigns from RLSS, RNLI and Fire Chiefs. Maybe needs a big name footballer or singer?

This this this.

And ohhhh I am so sad for all the families who have lost their children over the weekend. It’s awful.

Unfortunately the cost of swimming lessons is often prohibited and although schools are funded for primary children to be taught to swim it is woefully underfunded and inadequate. A term’s swimming lessons once a week are not going to make confident swimmers.

Drownings have halved since the 1980s.

see eg this post here looking at analysing the data.

https://www.outdoorswimmingsociety.com/drowning-statistics/

You can’t make such firm statements on your recollection of what happened in the 80s. It’s very clear, supported by data, that waterways are safer and there are less drownings now. You can just ask an AI and it takes a second:

“Many more in the 80s. The improvement is quite significant:

UK drowning fatalities across the five-year period 1985–1989 roughly halved compared to 2015–2019, with the rate dropping from 4.79 to 2.04 deaths per 100,000 people. By 2022, the rate had fallen to fewer than 1 in every 100,000. 

In 24 out of 37 years between 1983 and 2020, the UK saw a year-on-year decrease in the drowning rate.  Today, around 250 people die from drowning per year on average — roughly one every 1.5 days. 

The likely reasons for the long-term decline include better water safety education, improved lifeguard provision, fencing and signage around dangerous water, and better emergency response.

One recent caveat: there has been a slight uptick in drowning deaths in recent years, possibly linked to the boom in wild and outdoor swimming.  But even so, the numbers remain far below what they were in the 1980s.”

83pc of drownings are male.

About 95pc of drownings between the ages of 10 and 25 are male.

If you have sons, you should sit then down and have some serious conversations about water safety. Parents need to do this, not just expect an advert in Fortnite or on tiktok to do it for them

They might be able to swim in a pool but open water is much colder below the surface. You tire more quickly in the cold.

I am a regular open water swimmer. In the last few years, I've pulled a few young teen boys out of water where they have been struggling. Not immediate risk of drowning but clearly not coping and somehow too embarrassed to say "I need to get out".
Their brains are unable to risk assess accurately and their pride/fear of looking weak adds to that problem

Someone nearly drowned in a waterfall in my area.
There have been previous deaths there.
There are multiple signs that warn about this.
People still go in the water.

What more warnings should we give?

I'd personally go the way the French do it for road deaths with life size silhouettes marking where people died. Do this for water fatalities as well as RTCs. The Swiss also place memorial crosses or concrete plaques onto rocks at points where people fell to their deaths in the Alps, it certainly focuses the mind when you've got a big step across a gap or exposed section to contend with!!

This is the info that needs to be common knowledge.

(And some teens would still jump in - as others have said, this is not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination)

There are warnings and campaigns aplenty. Parents of those lost in water incidents have gone into schools, lectured kids of the dangers, handed out leaflets.
But teenagers have an unfortunate tendency to be right and everyone else is wrong. They just wont listen.
One lady on the news last night was talking about her son, who she lost 15 years ago, and 15 years on, still nobody is listening.
Tragic but inevitable, unfortunately