A sticky heat wave in Ontario this week sent people scurrying to lakes and pools to cool off, but naïveté and overconfidence have led to an alarming number of drownings, water safety experts say.
Lifesaving Society public education director Barbara Byers says she is frustrated, saddened and confused by how many people have died this week in the water in Toronto and other parts of the province.
“It’s very heartbreaking to hear about these fatalities and to know, in almost all cases, if people exhibited more risk-conscious behaviour they could be prevented,” Ms. Byers said.
Worse yet, most of the latest deaths don’t make any sense, she said. Seven of the 10 people she knows of who died by drowning in Ontario in the past 10 days have been children or teenagers. Lifesaving Society statistics, which are compiled using information from coroners’ offices, show adult men aged 18 to 34 are most likely to drown.
“It doesn’t fit with the usual picture,” Ms. Byers said. “I don’t know why.”
The number of drowning deaths in Canada and Ontario was shrinking earlier this decade, but spiked in recent years, she said. In 2006, 508 people drowned in Canada, 182 of them in Ontario. In 2004, 433 people drowned in Canada, 132 in Ontario.
Last Tuesday, a 48-year-old man and his five-year-old son drowned in Lake Huron when the father tried to rescue his son, who was swept away by a wave. The next day, two 14-year-old boys jumped into the deep end of a Scarborough apartment building pool and began to drown. One died that day, the other two days later. Hours before the second teen died on Friday, two boys, 12 and 13, visiting Toronto for a soccer tournament were rescued from an east Toronto hotel pool. The 12-year-old died in hospital.
On Saturday, a 13-year-old boy fell out of a motor boat and drowned on the Trent River. He was not wearing a life jacket. Underwater search-and-rescue crews pulled the body of a 39-year-old Etobicoke father from Lake Dalrymple, east of Orillia, on Tuesday morning. Local cottagers found his two sons floating in the lake on Monday with life jackets on. The trio had gone for a power boat ride earlier that day.
And the latest: A 13-year-old boy died after he was pulled out of his family’s backyard pool in Bradford on Tuesday evening.
People who overestimate their swimming abilities are the ones who find themselves in trouble, said Ontario Red Cross spokeswoman Tanya Elliott. Swimming can look easy, and people often want to do what their friends are doing.
“Any activity around water or in water is vastly different from activities in other areas,” Ms. Elliott said. “It’s easy to want to cool off, but fun can turn to tragedy pretty quickly if someone gets in over their head or they exceed their limits if they swim too far.”
People who can’t swim shouldn’t even venture into shallow water without a life jacket and supervision, Ms. Byers said. It can take as little as 20 seconds for someone to drown, she said.
“Some of those lakes, they’re shallow for a very long time. You can walk out for a fair distance, you can feel comfortable, touch the bottom maybe with water up to your waist and you feel good. All of a sudden, there’s a drop off and whammo,” Ms. Byers said. “For a non-swimmer that’s devastating.”
