Are you prepared for EVERY scenario?
In a recent YouTube video, a small child at a crowded hotel pool fights to stay afloat and eventually sinks to the bottom. He is surrounded by adults and other kids, but they are distracted by their own conversations and activities. Eventually, an alert 9-year-old signals two nurses who happened to be on-site, and they are able to revive the victim, even though he has been underwater for three minutes. Unfortunately, that type of happy ending is not always the case.
Water safety and emergency preparedness are such an important subject for recreation professionals who oversee youth-sports events, and I am not just referencing swimming events. Many of the fields and courts that host parks and rec activities are in close proximity to a body of water. Whether there is an outdoor pool, a small pond, or large lake, emergency preparedness is an important issue.
The stories below from Olympic swimmers, some of whom discuss their own near-drowning experiences as kids, hopefully will make people realize an incident can occur at any time.