For Kids in the Pool: Few Safety Standards . . . and No Guarantees

On Aug. 8, Michael Segall of Beverly Hills, 5 years old, drowned in the swimming pool of Camp Tumbleweed in the hills above Los Angeles. Unable to swim, he was one of eight children who had just finished a lesson at the shallow end, and one of two dozen in the pool. His teacher, who was in the water with the beginners, was 24, and Red Cross-certified in advanced lifesaving and water safety instruction, as were two lifeguards, 19 and 17, at poolside.

No one saw what happened: It was suddenly noticed that the child was submerged, and he was pulled to the surface, but efforts to revive him failed. Given the amount of pool supervision and the camp’s 34 years in business, the camp can only call the tragedy a “freak accident,” freak meaning that they can’t explain it, that even “people who are there,” says a camp spokesman, “don’t understand it.”

A Terrible Fact

It’s not so freak, however, if freak means inconceivable, impossible to anticipate or prevent. Every summer brings news of similar tragedies, and often the one firm fact is that no one saw the child go under--a fact more terrible to a stunned and saddened community because these are supervised facilities, chosen because of the supervision and the assumed promise of safety.

But safety isn’t guaranteed. There are few common standards and fewer laws of water safety and supervision for camps--not just private overnight camps, but day camps, municipal camps, school camps and church camps with no water facilities that take their kids to public pools or beaches.

There’s great variability, even disagreement about the proper procedures for both safety and instruction. Indeed, some think it so difficult to make normal water facilities safe for the youngest children--non-swimmers under 6 or 7--that they should not be there at all.

Even the statistics are uncertain: No one officially or formally tracks camp drownings, although “consistently in the last 15 years,” says Armand Ball, former executive vice president of the American Camping Assn., an industry group in Martinsville, Ind., “50% of the deaths in camps are from drowning.” At that, he speaks only for the ACA’s experience of 25 to 45 camp fatalities a season; the 4 million children in ACA-accredited camps represent only half the nation’s campers.

The general risk to children is obvious. According to the National Safety Council, almost a quarter of the victims of the estimated 5,600 accidental drownings in 1986 were children under 14.

But the only group really well-studied is the disproportionate number of children under 5 who drown in back-yard swimming pools--in 1985, 236 out of all 416 residential pool drownings, with 4,400 “near-drownings” requiring a hospital visit, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission in Washington.

‘Silent Accident’

From these studies, however, comes the water safety expert’s awful understanding of this swift and “silent accident”: more often victims are from of a “lapse in supervision than a lack of supervision,” a commission spokesman says.

Oddly, given the danger, only one parent of a dozen interviewed said she asked a prospective camp if there was always a lifeguard on duty at the pool, and that’s all she asked. “You figure the camp is a professional organization that’s been around a number of years,” explains Dorothy Clark, a Los Angeles mother, “so you put aside your usual concerns.”

“I relied on my conversation with the owners,” says a father, John Lungren Jr., of Fair Oaks, Calif., “who seemed competent, professional and interested in the kids. You place great faith in individuals, and don’t want to believe there’s anything to worry about.”

Many people assume that there is some regulation of children’s camps beyond the usual sanitation and building codes, but only 13 states have specific camp safety laws. Even those have limitations: Michigan’s don’t cover day camps open fewer than 96 hours in a two-week period, and Connecticut’s don’t cover municipal or state camps.

All of the 13, however, deal with water safety--not just water clarity, absence of hazards and lifesaving equipment, but supervision. Some are minimal: California requires one lifeguard for every 25 people, and a “designated aquatic supervisor” older than 18 with advanced lifesaving credentials at the pool at all times. Some are comprehensive: New York spells out requirements for age and credentials of waterfront supervisors (over 21, water safety instructor, and three years’ waterfront experience), as well as lifeguards and counselors, and defines the number of each required for swimmers of various ages. Some also spell out safety procedures--”buddy” systems that pair up swimmers, “lost swimmer” drills, testing and division of children according to ability.

Still, “most states make no effort” to establish safety standards for camp activities, said Sen. Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.) when he introduced in 1987 the latest in more than a decade of bills proposing federal minimum standards. Weicker was inspired by Connecticut resident Mitch Kurman, a furniture salesman who lost his 15-year-old son in a YMCA camp canoe trip in 1965, and who was instrumental in the passage of several state laws, including Connecticut’s and New York’s.

But such legislation has never had enough support, from either camping groups or members of Congress, and the current bill is given little chance of passage. “The kids don’t have a lobby,” Kurman says.

There are some standards of safety set for camps that want to be accredited by the American Camping Assn. With the exception of one mandatory feature (someone certified in lifesaving present at all aquatic activities), the aquatic standards permit some latitude, allowing individual camps to choose, for example, their own “safety system . . . that enables lifeguards to quickly account for all participants” and to establish appropriate “minimum ratios of participants to lifeguards and lookouts.”

“Things vary according to whether it’s a pool or a lake, a light or dark bottom,” explains Marge Scanlin, the ACA’s director of standards and education, “and it was impossible to say ‘This is what the ratio should be.”’ The camps must, however, put such plans into writing, and defend them when they’re reviewed for accreditation every three years.

But it’s left to many camps to recognize that water safety is, in the words of American Red Cross aquatics associate Jon Martindale in Washington, “the biggest hazard they face.” The risk varies: pools are dangerous because they’re almost always three feet deep at their shallowest, lakes dangerous because of their area. Camps that share waterfront facilities or municipal pools have extra problems of intermingling and crowding, and seem to surface more often in news stories--the July drowning, for example, of a 6-year-old boy among 120 people in a Boston municipal pool, unnoticed by five lifeguards and 14 counselors from his school’s day camp.

People ask about lifeguards because that’s all they know of water safety, and camps, understandably, emphasize their presence. Lifeguards are usually certified by the American Red Cross, for Advanced Lifesaving (15 years and older, with 27 hours survival and rescue training), Lifeguarding (16 years old, 63 hours training, including Lifesaving, CPR, and First Aid), and Water Safety Instruction (17 years old, with Advanced Lifesaving and training in how to teach swimming to various age groups).

The YMCA has similar programs for certifying lifeguards and instructors, all emphasizing “how to handle different situations,” says Millard Freeman, national YMCA aquatic director. Young children, for example, are “a very special group requiring specific handling,” not just by instructors but by lifeguards who are trained in “potential victim identification” as well as in techniques of “scanning” the water.

But there’s more to it. Some camps include all certified staff, if not everyone at the waterfront, in their safety count. Others exclude those teaching, because, Martindale says, “instructors can’t be lifeguards while they’re teaching.” Indeed, Millard Freeman tells of the time a Y instructor was teaching five little children to float, and didn’t realize that the four-year-old slightly to her left had blacked out: it was the lifeguard who noticed the child wasn’t raising her head.

Certification doesn’t really guarantee skill or experience. Martindale suggests asking what swimming tests the camp gives counselors; Scanlin suggests asking their experience with the particular age group and the situation they’re going to cover. One should also, Millard Freeman says, observe “a class in session, not a sterile empty facility with all the kickboards put away, and see what kind of control and discipline they have.”

Nor is vigilance guaranteed. “You can have all the certifications in the world and the proper numbers,” says Robert Burhans, in charge of the children’s camp program under New York’s Health Department, “but if the staff is not actively supervising, you can have injuries.”

One traditional backup is the “buddy” system, whereby kids stick together in pairs and raise hands when a whistle blows, but it’s no longer ubiquitous. It’s considered hard to maintain at day camps permitting two-, three- and five-day enrollments, whose swimming groups therefore change daily. It may also seem primitive in a day of professionalism.

But many think the principle still valid. In New York, one of this summer’s reported “submersion resuscitations” involved a child saved because his 7-year-old buddy quickly called for help, and the Pacific Palisades YMCA camp instituted a buddy system this summer in an effort to “tighten up” procedures after a 6-year-old girl was saved from drowning in July by an alert lifeguard who saw only bubbles come up when she went underwater in free-swim time.

Contrary to common belief, the floats sometimes put around children’s arms or waists are not safety aids, or at least shouldn’t be used as such. They permit children to “move through the water on their own” during a lesson, says Freeman, “but we emphasize that they’re ‘IFDs’--Instructional Flotation Devices--and not safety devices. You don’t go off and leave them.”

Many camps have special rules and ratios for the children most at risk--the youngest, who swim poorly, if at all, and who at 5 or 6 may be barely head-above-water at a 3-foot depth. New York requires (besides the waterfront supervisor) one qualified lifeguard for every 25 bathers, plus enough counselors to yield a ratio of 1 observer to 10 children, 1 to 8 for children under 8, and 1 to 6 for children under 6.

Children under 7 aren’t permitted in the Los Angeles municipal pools at all, for play or lessons, unless they’re accompanied, individually, by a parent or other adult. “Unless you have a one-to-one relationship, arm’s length,” Vowels says, “you’re flirting with disaster.”