Drowning blame game

WE ARE a nation surrounded by water. Yet every year people drown at the beach, at rivers and even in swimming pools.

Some of these incidents are preventable. Some are not. All are tragic. But when a child is involved, the sense of loss is compounded by the simple fact of youth. The innocence of play is transformed into something nightmarish. Water, one of the simplest substances, becomes the setting for a complex minefield of legal and moral culpability: who is to blame?

The death of five-year-old Damarie Jeffrey, who drowned on Sunday at the Fun Splash Water Park, Debe, has set off claims and counterclaims.

“We don’t have lifeguards, we have pool attendants,” Vijay Ramai, the owner of Fun Splash, told Newsday. “We classify them as pool attendants rather than lifeguards because our experience has taught us that when many of our customers come with kids, because they see the word ‘lifeguard,’ they believe they can leave their children unsupervised.”

There are many unanswered questions surrounding this incident. Damarie was at a birthday party for his two-year-old cousin. It is unclear how he ended up in the adult section of the pool. There are no cameras. People around did not seem to notice.

“Everybody was there having a good time and in the blink of an eye tragedy struck,” Mr Ramai said.

It is a pattern replicated in all such tragedies.

When it comes to public swimming sites, there is very little formally in place by way of regulation. Beaches are meant to be manned by lifeguards, but not all of them are, and the few lifeguards on duty are overstretched. Recreational parks have become popular, but there is no sign they have been made any safer by means of stronger regulation.

Hence, we can seemingly have a situation in which it is not compulsory for trained lifeguards to be present at a site. This gap should be plugged.

You could say more people should be encouraged to learn how to swim. But even so, young children will always pose challenges. For example, children left at day-care centres in this country have drowned, finding themselves in pools in nearby yards despite the normally robust supervision associated with such facilities.

Older children, too, have succumbed, such as 12-year-old Enrico Curt Isiah Duncan, a student of Tranquillity Government Secondary School, who died on a school expedition to a hotel pool in the presence of a lifeguard in April 2001. A court later found hotel officials negligent and awarded substantial damages. Evidence suggested the lifeguard’s back was turned for a few minutes.

Even if we cannot prevent all such cases, we should work to make them as rare as possible. That means better laws and regulations.