15 ms·
As someone who worked as a wave pool lifeguard for 8 years and is a current certified Water Safety Instructor, I mostly agree. The large rafts are never really
by lzol 7y ago
As someone who worked as a wave pool lifeguard for 8 years and is a current certified Water Safety Instructor, I mostly agree. The large rafts are never really what I have an issue with. It's water wings and other personal flotation devices that are much more troublesome.
Parents are a huge part of the issue. PFDs give them a false sense of security where they feel like they don't have to watch their kid. The best change my old pool ever made was banning them (besides USCG approved life vests). The rafts were almost never an issue unless parents stuck their kid in the middle and stopped supervising (which happened a lot and we'd yell at the about). Crappy parental supervision is the cause of most problems at pools.
- keanzu 7y agoSomehow people don't realize the danger that pools possess. Swimming is one of the few activities that children engage in which can go so wrong as to end up in their death. I would suggest that it is borderline negligence for a parent to put a child in such a dangerous situation without proper precautions (supervision). I wouldn't let a small child I am responsible for go into a pool alone regardless of the presence of lifeguards. Especially not a wave pool.
- pmarreck 7y ago> Swimming is one of the few activities that children engage in which can go so wrong as to end up in their death Climbing trees (fall risk) Climbing tall playground equipment (I broke my arm falling from a height of just 3 feet once, on one of those). Broken neck, etc. Playing in the street (cars) Bicycling (can get hit by a car, sigh) Trampoline (don't get me started) Exploring (falling down deep wells, etc.) The Gashlycrumb Tinies is not just a morbid story about impossible deaths. Living is dangerous, living young possibly especially so!
- buckminster 7y agoMaking fireworks that closely resembled pipe bombs (almost blew leg off)
- pmarreck 7y agooh jesus. yeah, exactly! I had a pyromaniac phase. Once set a field on fire. Things could have gone extremely worse.
- razakel 7y agoPeter Thiel mentions in his autobiography that, out of the six co-founders of PayPal, four of them made bombs in high school.
- keanzu 7y agoTory Bruno, CEO of the United Launch Alliance, made rockets out of 80yo moldy dynamite. 6m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdPoVi_h0r0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdPoVi_h0r0
- zipwitch 7y agoMoldy? Psh, that's nothing. The real excitement begins when you play with the sweat coming off the dynamite, like we did back when I was a kid in the 80s! Note: the above is sarcasm. "Sweating" or "weeping" dynamite is dangerous and you should immediately leave the area and contact your local equivalent of 'the bomb squad' to report it.
- keanzu 7y agoOver time, regardless of the sorbent used, sticks of dynamite will "weep" or "sweat" nitroglycerin, which can then pool in the bottom of the box or storage area. For that reason, explosive manuals recommend the repeated turning over of boxes of dynamite in storage. Crystals will form on the outside of the sticks, causing them to be even more sensitive to shock, friction, and temperature. Therefore, while the risk of an explosion without the use of a blasting cap is minimal for fresh dynamite, old dynamite is dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite
- ryandrake 7y ago
- keanzu 7y agoSo none of those activities resulted in your death? Or are you posting on HN from beyond the grave?
- pmarreck 7y agoNone did, this was a counterargument to the claim that swimming was "one of the few" ways for kids to die. There are unfortunately many many ways for kids to die.
- cortesoft 7y agoYeah, but drowning is way more common than the other ones. This is like saying, "Well, I am not going to wear my seat belt, since people also die from being struck by lightning" Just because multiple things are possible doesn't mean they are equally probable.
- hutzlibu 7y agoHousehold: - various kitchentools, knives, fork - other tools, axe, hammer - (poison) cleaning stuff - climbing on the tish and falling on their neck - ... Yes, life is dangerous, yet sadly most parents today take the approach of avoiding all dangers at all cost. And of course you should not leave dangerous things around and make it as safe as possible, but how can one learn, how to deal with dangers, when all the slightest dangers are removed? That will only hurt later on. One have to play with fire, to learn how to deal with it. If parents forbid it completely, kids will just burn stuff on their own. I did ... and luckily I never burned anything down. But friends of mine ... allmost burned down a village.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yCombLinks 7y agoDrowning far outweighs all of those categories for ages 1 - 9 https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2011-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj... In the large majority of motor vehicle incidents the child is an occupant of the vehicle : https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812383 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
- keanzu 7y agoI see they have a category "Unintentional Pedestrian, Other" unable to find a glossary. Possibly refers to being hit by MV while a pedestrian? Unintentional Poisoning seems really common for adults?! Misuse of prescription drugs apparently.
- yCombLinks 7y agoThat's also illegal drugs, IE opiod overdoses https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5605a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5605a1.htm
- Defenestresque 7y agoThe graph in your first link is absolutely fascinating. I found the number of "Unintentional Poisoning" and "Suicide" deaths especially surprising (due to the high numbers)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kempbellt 7y agoThe most likely outcome from all the scenarios you mentioned is that nothing happens. Kids do these things all the time and are just fine. Injuries occur occasionally, and even less frequently are those injuries fatal. A friend of mine supermaned head-first into a tree while snowboarding last year. The tree was probably a foot in diameter, and he was going fast enough to shake snow off the whole tree. What happened? Nothing. We all laughed about it and kept snowboarding. We are pretty resilient creatures when it comes to impact damage. Drowning though, completely different. Much like filling a car's oil intake with dirt and then having the engine immediately seize. If you start breathing in water, you're do some serious damage to your lungs and cutting off oxygen to your brain, and further inhibiting basic survival functionality, and quickly resulting in death, if not remedied immediately.
- vasco 7y agoIt depends on the child's ability. Plenty of kids were swimming by themselves in the ocean at 8 or younger because they had a lot of experience or even doing competive swimming from younger ages. Most parents when I was a kid would set rules as too how far into the sea you could swim and that'd be it. I think this is common throughout the world in places close to beaches as I was.
- _ph_ 7y agoI think the key is: learn swimming in an early age and then regularly go swimming. Swimming, not using floating toys. Children, who regularly play in the water - we did all kind of water-wrestling :) - can get extremely proficient at it.
- jschwartzi 7y agoYeah I’m taking swimming lessons as an adult after totally failing to retain what I was taught as a child. You have to practice and play in the water constantly to develop any proficiency. To get a child to do that means they have to not be afraid of the water.
- Swizec 7y agoCan confirm, grew up near the sea, was free diving for shiny rocks and shells by 7 or 8 and would spend hours in the water every day of vacation. Parents had to basically drag me out so I wouldn’t starve.
- killjoywashere 7y ago> I wouldn't let a small child I am responsible for go into a pool alone You would. Let me give you the scenario: you're home alone with the three kids, you've been chasing them around, doing laundry, cleaning up spilled grape juice, telling Jenny to stop cutting Tommy's hair, etc. Finally, you think everyone is down for a nap. You turn on the game. 5 minutes later, 5 minutes, you think "It's too quiet...". You get up and walk around for a couple minutes to find 4 year-old Sally's door open. No Sally. Where's Sally? Sprint around the house, run down to the kitchen, look in the back yard, and she's face down in the pool. You immediately get her out, desperate. You realize you have to separate from her to call 911. She's been unaccounted for by now for 12 minutes. The paramedics get a breath back, but anoxic brain injury has set in. She dies, tubes in every orifice, 3 days later. I have seen this play out more than once. My parents had a pool. I was a lifeguard, have made rescues. I was also on swim team, I'm in the Navy now, and I'm a physician. I surf, I dive, I do open ocean swimming and triathlons. I've helped rescue a diver in pulmonary edema. I think I wouldn't leave my kid unattended, but I know I might. I've met the parents. They wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone either.
- lacker 7y agoI don't have a pool, thus solving this problem.
- reaperducer 7y agoI suppose you also avoid getting mugged by never leaving your room, thus solving this problem.
- strbean 7y agoUntil someone breaks into your backyard and sets up a kiddy pool, and your toddler goes and falls into it!
- keanzu 7y agoI have a pool. I have a fence. A friend's son was visiting, also four years old, vanished for just a second and suddenly I thought Oh god, the pool. Sure enough there he was stuck outside the fence trying to get to the pool but frustrated that the latching mechanism can only be operated by someone at least 5 feet tall. I wouldn't let a small child go into a pool alone. Pool safety is life and death. Get a fence.
- gowld 7y agoSwimming is weird, right? Imagine if whenever you took a step outside you had to remember to put your foot back down or else you'd drift off into the vacuum of space. You could jump and fly around like a balloon but if you went too high you could never get back down. Swimming is that but upside-down.
- atoav 7y agoI grew up near a lake in the Alps and I am quite sure that any floatation device in Europe that is not safe for leaving your kids unsupervised has a big warning sign printed on the floatatiin device itself. An exeption were these orange things you strap onto a child's arms, and inflate, which they can't really remove by themselves.
- vict00ms 7y agoThose are called "water wings" in the US and the person you were replying to feels quite the opposite about their safety; the ones I've seen available for purchase in the states are easy to dislodge accidentally.
- sokoloff 7y agoThe ones which are just placed on the arms and not tethered to each other have a failure mode where they easily come off if the child puts their arms straight up. Unfortunately, this is also a common drowning fear response. In general, I want people to have full market freedoms, but I put those water wings pretty near lawn darts in terms of danger.
- OkayPhysicist 7y agoI'd call lawn darts safer, as the danger with them is a lot more obvious. Everyone understands that throwing sharp things at people will lead to injury. It takes a significantly more informed consumer to know that a product masquerading as a safety tool is ineffectual at best.
- mcv 7y agoAll of the ones I've encountered in Europe are practically impossible to dislodge once they've been inflated.
- kubanczyk 7y agoAll of the ones I've encountered in Europe have a butterfly-ish creature on one side and warnings in a dozen languages on the other side - not a safe flotation device.