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Abstract
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Each one of the over 3,000 drownings that occur every year in the United States is a tragedy (Kochanek, Murphy, Anderson, & Scott, 2004), but when a drowning occurs during the time a lifeguard is on duty, additional questions need to be asked. Over the years, we, as part of our responsibilities as officers of the National Aquat- ics Safety Company (NASCO), have investigated numerous incidents of drowning that should have been obvious to the lifeguards on duty. Now the most pressing questions become, "What went wrong? Why didn't the guard see and recognize the victim in time to prevent the drowning?"
NASCO has taken a different approach to researching these questions than is usual in our industry. Many of the practices and procedures in lifeguarding were not developed using commonly accepted scientific or engineering principles but evolved from individual lifeguard experiences. This has been true from the days of Commodore Longfellow in 1914, when he and the American Red Cross founded the Red Cross water-safety education program and the Red Cross Life Saving Corps (International Swimming Hall of Fame, n.d.). At the beginning of the century, the national drowning rate was 10.4 per 100,000 (International Swimming Hall of Fame, n.d.). The lifeguarding practices and procedures that have been developed over the last century plus the swimming programs that have taught hundreds of millions of Americans to swim have reduced that drowning rate significantly to 1.2 per 100,000 in 2002 (Kochanek et al., 2004).
This type of "experiential" approach has saved uncounted lives, but the environ- ment in which lifeguards operate has changed. For most of the 20th century, most lifeguards worked at waterfronts or small flat-water pools serving a few thousand people a season. This started to change in the 1980s, and now a large number of lifeguards work in water parks where they might be responsible for thousands of guests in a single day and litigation awaits every incident. Lifeguarding practices and procedures need to be based on the same principles that are used by other industries in which an individual can affect public safety—examples being com- mercial airline pilots, nuclear-power-plant operators, and long-haul truck drivers. This does not mean that aquatic facilities should be considered common carriers or hazardous industries. They are very different from those types of industry, although some legislators and jurists mistakenly persist in trying to make the connection. Nonetheless, some of the extensive research and development that has been applied to workers in those industries needs to be applied to lifeguarding. In fact, the 2002 World Congress on Drowning in Amsterdam recommended, as item number 6 of its 12 recommendations, that |