Last week the Lifesaving Society of Manitoba embarked on a Northern and Parkland tour to meet with their partners and stakeholders in the communities to talk about water safety and putting their message out about drowning prevention.
On average, the Lifesaving Society sees around 22 drowning incidents a year on a five-year average in Manitoba and their goal is to get people thinking about water safety and to bring that number down.
“We believe as an organization that one drowning death is one too many and 22 is far too high,” said Lifesaving Society of Manitoba Water Smart and Safety Management Co-ordinator Dr. Christopher Love.
“Drowning is the process of experiencing respiratory impairment due to submersion; it’s not like what is seen in the movies.
“People are generally under the water when drowning initially starts and they spend about 90 percent of the time below the surface when this occurs. They can’t yell for help or make noise and this can happen very fast. This is why we advocate that people need to be very attentive around the water.”
There are a number of ways to prevent drowning incidents from occurring and the biggest factor is supervision.
“We talk about layers of protection when it comes to this subject, so that’s things like learning how to swim and having active adult supervision at all times,” said Love. “This is how we will prevent drowning incidents from happening. The third one is to swim at a lifeguarded facility because statistics show that under 1 percent of drowning incidents happen at guarded facilities.
“The number one thing we see in both our Manitoba and national statistics is that drowning fatalities for children under 12, almost 90 to 100 percent of cases happen when children are alone. As soon as you add an adult to the equation to supervise, that percentage drops to close to zero.
“It may be annoying to some parents or adults, but it’s the one step that needs to happen in order to prevent a tragedy from taking place,” said Love. “Drowning prevention is our mission and we want to make sure people are taking part in a healthy and engaging manner when it comes to being in the water.”
Right now there is a massive lifeguarding shortage across the Province. Many aquatic facilities are struggling to find staff for lifeguarding and teaching swimming lessons in the community. This is a problem also for the Valley.
“Lifeguard shortage is not just a Manitoba issue, it’s across Canada and North America,” said Love. “We’ve had low-level staffing issues for years in the industry because it’s very often not seen as prestigious and the first choice for employment.
“Then with COVID-19, pools were shut down and the vast majority of staff were laid off. These people needed to pay their bills and went on to find other jobs. We’re seeing that these people aren’t coming back to work in this field and are staying in their new careers as a result of this.
“Combine that with the fact that we’ve had two years with very little to no training of new lifeguards, and this all contributes to the shortages we’re seeing,” said Love.
The Lifesaving Society of Manitoba is working hard to address the issue by helping to facilitate more training courses to be held within communities, to train staff to fill the vacancies.
“We’re working as hard as we can with our partners to get courses up and running to train new lifeguards,” said Love. “We’re helping to source people from our office or finding someone who can come to that particular community and offer the training needed.
“People have to realize that it took two years to put things into this situation and we’re not going to get out of it overnight. We don’t want to compromise quality for lifeguards and we want people to still be safe when they come to the pool.”