Spreading the Word to City’s Indochinese : River Drownings at Popular Picnic Spot Spur Work on Safety Booklet

The accidental drowning of two Cambodian girls in the San Diego River on Sunday has prodded the Police Department to decide to quickly create a pamphlet in three Indochinese languages warning of the river’s dangers and outlining proper emergency and rescue procedures.

The morning after a family outing turned into tragedy, police decided to put together a pamphlet in Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong in hopes of preventing accidents.

“It is a message that we’d actually give to anyone (and) it might save a life in the future,” police spokesman Dave Cohen said of the pamphlet.

Bunson Un, 10, and Ol San, 8, of the 5200 block of Rex Avenue, apparently wandered away from their picnicking families at about 3 p.m. Sunday and were later discovered submerged in the water under the Interstate 805 overpass near the 3100 block of Camino del Rio North. The girls, at least one of whom did not know how to swim, were rushed to Sharp Memorial Hospital by paramedics and were pronounced dead upon arrival.

The pamphlet being created will be part of an “educational package” for Indochinese immigrants on safety precautions, the use of the river--which has no lifeguards or signs--and whom to call in case of an emergency, according to John Slough, community relations officer for the Police Department. The information package will be delivered at temples, community meetings, social service organizations and year-round schools in areas where there are concentrations of Indochinese immigrants: Downtown, East and Southeast San Diego, Linda Vista and Logan Heights.

Department officers have also discussed asking the city to place warning signs near the rivers’ edge, Slough said.

Some of the 2,000 to 3,000 pamphlets to be completed by the weekend might also be distributed to picnickers on the shores of the river, Slough said.

The pamphlet is being written and translated by the Police Department’s five Indochinese community service officers and by translators serving the estimated 50,000 San Diego Indochinese, who represent four languages.

However, the pamphlet is not being produced for the estimated 25,000 members of the Vietnamese community, the largest Indochinese population in San Diego, because the department says that, unlike the other communities, most of them do not frequent the river’s edge.

The area where the girls drowned is a popular fishing hole for many Southeast Asian refugees since they began coming to San Diego in large numbers about 12 years ago. The green banks resemble the terrain of their homelands, Slough said.

Drownings in the river in the absence of a storm or flood is “not a common occurrence,” Cohen said.

Paramedics who arrived at the scene Sunday administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to try to revive the girls. According to the San Diego Chapter of the American Heart Assn., the outcome of the incident might have been different if someone had initiated CPR before the paramedics arrived. But the American Heart Assn., the San Diego and Imperial County Chapter of the Red Cross, and the San Diego County Department of Social Services do not teach CPR classes in any of the four Indochinese languages.

“We don’t have people to teach (in any of the Indochinese languages), and we’re still trying to reach the English-speaking population,” said Francine Phillips, community director for the Heart Assn.

Both the Red Cross and the Heart Assn. said they are interested in initiating CPR classes for the Indochinese community and just need people to put in the less than 20 hours needed to become certified CPR instructors.