Final Wave : Project Wipeout Teaches Young People to Look Before They Leap

It was a chilly, gray sky above Newport Beach’s 58th Street beach on the May day in 1983 when John Boden slipped beneath the waves and resigned himself to death.

Boden, an experienced surfer who had ridden the waves at Orange County beaches for 10 years, had decided to take advantage of the higher tides and larger surf created by the El Nino condition then present in the Southern California coastal waters.

But with the increased tides and waves came changes in the depth and shape of the sea bottom near the shore. Sands had shifted and the contours of the bottom, usually familiar to Boden, had changed.

Then, on one ride, Boden fell from his surfboard, dropping head first into the water. It was something he had done before. Wiping out was nothing new to him.

But on that day the ocean bottom--a sand bar--was barely out of sight beneath the surface.

“It was like a big bell ringing when I hit,” said Boden, “I just floated there, face down. I couldn’t move anything. I started having flashbacks of my whole life, of my wife who was pregnant at the time. I just figured I was going to die.”

Still attached to his surfboard by a leash, Boden was shortly washed ashore and was found, alive but immobile, minutes later on the sand. Today Boden, a full-time accounting student at Cal State Fullerton, is a quadriplegic with limited use of his arms and legs.

Boden’s voice came close to breaking several times as he talked about his ordeal Tuesday at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach. He and a conference room full of hospital employees, local government representatives, lifeguards, paramedics and others had just watched a film dramatization of a diving accident at the beach that closely resembled Boden’s own story.

The film, titled “Wipeout,” financed by Hoag and produced shortly after Boden’s accident, has been shown to an estimated 500,000 Southern California schoolchildren and is one of the centerpieces of Project Wipeout, a program designed to educate young people about the dangers of spinal cord injuries related to aquatic sports.

The program, started by Hoag two years ago, has since garnered support from Newport Beach lifeguards and paramedics, local swimwear and sportswear manufacturers and retail outlets.

Project Wipeout’s newest push for visibility involves the marketing of T-shirts featuring the program’s logo and the logo of any corporate sponsor donating $1,000 or more to the project. A tag listing eight water safety precautions also will be attached to the shirts. The profits from the shirts, which will sell for $7 and are scheduled to be stocked soon by Orange County beachwear retailers, will be used to pay for brochures and other educational materials the project hands out to schoolchildren, said John Barbadian, one of the project coordinators.

The numbers of spinal injuries handled at Hoag and other Southern California hospitals each year is an indication that such injuries cannot be considered isolated freaks, said Dr. John Skinner, a specialist in internal medicine who is also a surfer and former Newport Beach lifeguard. The year of Boden’s accident, he said, was one of the worst. In 1983, he said, Hoag treated more than 100 teen-agers for beach-related spinal injuries. Sixty percent of them suffered some form of permanent paralysis. Several died.

Diving Into Water

All of these accidents, said Skinner, occurred as a result of the victims diving into water that was not as deep as they thought it was.

“It’s very sobering,” he said, “because virtually all of these accidents could have been prevented. We’re just trying to get one message across: Test the depth of the water with your feet and not with your head.”

Project Wipeout’s fresh warnings come just three months after state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) reintroduced legislation that would exempt beach cities from liability for such accidents.

But spinal injury accidents aren’t specific to California, or even to the ocean, said Skinner. Any area where people surf or dive--in the ocean, in rivers or in lakes--can present a danger.

Still, said Newport Beach Marine Lifeguard Director Ken Jacobsen, the beaches of Southern California can be among the most treacherous. And Jacobsen, who speaks to students at nearly 40 schools in the Orange County area, said he spares no one’s emotions while hammering that point home.

“I’ve seen a lot of things happen at the beach that would break your heart,” he said. “I tell the kids that a spinal injury is a one-time injury, that when you break your neck, it’s forever. I scare these kids with facts, shock them. I can put them in tears. That’s my object, to scare them to death.”

Reaction Overwhelming

The reaction to Jacobsen’s talks, and to the 23-minute film, “Wipeout,” that often accompanies them, is “overwhelming,” he said. “They get very emotionally involved. They talk to their peers about it. They get emotionally wiped out.”

“Wipeout,” is not a gruesome film, but it is starkly realistic. It is the story of a high-school-aged boy, handsome and athletic, who dives into shallow surf and is rendered a quadriplegic. It dramatizes the effect on both the victim and his family and emphasizes the permanent nature of his injury.

“It was a tough movie for me to watch,” said Boden, 28, who lives in Anaheim. “It was a lot like what happened to me. I was crying a lot in the hospital, too. I was whimpering. Like the kid in the movie, I didn’t know what was going on.”

Project coordinator Barbadian said other films may be made on the subject if sales of the T-shirts bring in enough money. And spinal injuries at Orange County beaches have decreased since 1983, he added, possibly as a result of the greater news exposure such injuries have received--coupled with less hazardous surf with the passing of the El Nino conditions.

Still, said Skinner, spinal cord injuries present more than physical hardships.

Medical bills for care of spinal cases can run “into the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. And scores of lawsuits have been brought against beach communities by spinal injury victims and their families which, he said, eventually could undermine city economies and trigger legislation that would limit public access to beaches.

$6-Million Settlement

In Orange County, perhaps the best known case involved John Taylor, a Claremont teen-ager who in 1980 emerged a quadriplegic after he dove into shallow Newport Beach surf near the Balboa Pier and struck a sand bar. His attorneys claimed in court that his injuries could have been avoided had the city posted warning signs about the constantly shifting ocean floor. Taylor won a $6-million settlement from the City of Newport Beach as a result of the accident.

Prompted by the suit, Bergeson introduced legislation in February, 1985, to exempt local governments from liability for injuries resulting from natural conditions at beaches, parks and other recreational areas. The bill was killed in the Senate Judiciary Committee last May, but Bergeson reintroduced similar legislation in February.

Since the Taylor suit, Newport Beach has posted warning signs on lifeguard towers and at intervals along the beach.

But, said Skinner, the signs should not be thought of as absolution from individual responsibility.

“I don’t think it’s realistic to think that signs will correct the problem,” he said. “I talked to several spinal injury patients last summer and asked them if they saw the signs and they said ‘no,’ that they were looking down, concentrating on where they were walking.

‘Saddened by Suits

“I’m very saddened by these suits because they threaten to cause the closure of the beaches because of fear of litigation. The hazards out there are natural; they’re not man-made. It seems ridiculous that a city or county would be held responsible for them. It’s really the responsibility of the individual. The situations can be tragic, but cities can be devastated by these lawsuits.”

For Boden, however, the answer is early education.

“I told the people at Hoag that I’d be available whenever they wanted me to talk to people about how to prevent these injuries,” he said. “It felt so weird that it had happened to me and not someone else. I thought there was no way it could, that it just happened to people from San Bernardino or someplace like that who weren’t familiar with the ocean. But it can happen, no matter how good you think you are. That bottom is always changing.”