RESCUE101

Since Southern California first established itself as a mecca for health fanatics and sun-seekers, inlanders have met the sea en masse on Los Angeles County beaches. Last year, an estimated 54 million people hit the sand between San Pedro and the Ventura County line.

For casual visitors, the subtle readings of tide, surf and current go unseen. The ocean is simply a watery playground. They romp through shallows loaded with stingrays. They blissfully drift into surf that could thump and spin them like a cement mixer. And they walk onto jetties during lulls in the swell, risking a gnarly slide off the rocks when a wave rolls in.

Often they’re lucky. Sometimes they’re not.

Los Angeles County lifeguards deal with the resulting problems. Last year, the force’s 137 full-time and 600 seasonal guards did 9,408 rescues, down from 13,717 the year before.

Each year, several hundred candidates vie for one of about 30 new lifeguard positions. After a qualifying swim, the county interviews the top 70 finishers and performs background checks. Those who are accepted attend the L.A. County lifeguard training academy, based in Manhattan Beach. The following photos, taken over the 10-week training period this year, document their grueling work. What do the chosen few have to look forward to as full-fledged lifeguards? As these three tales reveal, blitz rescues, flying fists and the ever-present danger of rip currents.

And they are not always appreciated. “I tell people I wouldn’t even go out today,” says Jon Van Duinwyk, a guard for five years at Zuma Beach. “They go, ‘Don’t worry about me pal. I’m fine.’ Then we pull them out later.”

Which is when things can get dramatic.

*

Feb. 18, 1996. the water is a frigid 56 degrees; a santa Ana wind whips up an afternoon chop, and a massive ground swell rumbles in from the north Pacific.

Waves with 20-foot faces graze the deck of the Manhattan Beach pier. Surfers trying to paddle out can’t pierce the mountains of whitewater breaking more than 150 yards past the end of the pier.

With no one in the water, lifeguard Mel Solberg, 35, has little to worry about as he watches from the tower on the pier. Midafternoon, two sisters, ages 15 and 13, walk through a shallow area and stand on a sandbar. They aren’t swimming, and the fury of the surf is largely dissipated that close to shore. One of the kids is even wearing little boots.

But in a snap, a rogue wave breaks far outside and re-forms, maintaining enough force to knock the sisters off the sandbar into an inshore trough.

Heavy surf has already striated and pockmarked the sandy bottom into a minefield of hazards. All that incoming water needs a place to escape and a torrent is flowing along the beach through the trough and then to an outgoing channel--a giant rip current, the culprit in almost 90% of rescues.

The girls disappear in the foam.

Solberg jumps out of the tower. He’s got on one swim fin and has no time to put on a wetsuit. He hits the icy water. The girls flow laterally and are headed out to sea. “I was absolutely convinced they were gone,” Solberg says.

He remembers using the riptide to his advantage. He lets the current carry him through the waves. At the “drop zone,” where the surf first crashes, he spots the older sister. “As I swam toward her, I saw the younger sister’s hair floating on the surface,” he says.

The swells let up for a moment. Grab this, he yells to the older girl, handing her his rescue float. He reaches the younger girl and holds her head out of the water. She is unconscious and not breathing.

Another lifeguard arrives to take the older girl. Solberg lays the younger child on the orange rescue float and tries to resuscitate her. She spits out foam with her first breath.

The lifeguard is spent, but a frothy wall of water wells up behind him. He turns on his back and kicks as hard as he can, holding the girl on top of him. He barely crests the first wave as the lip pitches and thunder-rolls toward shore. He keeps pushing for the horizon, just missing repeated avalanches of whitewater.

Finally, a Baywatch boat picks them up outside the surf. The girls are rushed to a hospital, where they recover. “Had we gone over the falls on one of those waves, she would have died for sure,” says Solberg, who receives the department’s medal of valor for his efforts. “And I may have too.”

*

STEVE LOCKWOOD WORKS THE BAYWATCH Cabrillo station, patrolling the waters off San Pedro in one of the department’s dual-prop, 300-horsepower rescue boats. As a 30-year veteran, he’s witnessed a lot of bad judgments with tragic endings: boat captains who fall overboard and drown because no one else on deck knows how to steer or use the radio, drunken navigators who leave Catalina at night, unknowingly pull a U-turn and slam full-speed into the island. “We’ve even had people asleep at the wheel and hit the island,” he says. “They put their boat on autopilot and go in the cabin and take a nap.

“Well, eventually it arrives.”

Still, Lockwood is incredulous when on July 4 this year, at about 5:15 p.m., he listens to some puzzling events unfold over the radio. A speedboat in the middle of the Catalina channel is sinking. A woman aboard a nearby 25-foot sailboat, the Cha Cha Cha, screams: Coast Guard, why aren’t you here? You don’t understand, you have to get here now!

Lockwood, 49, and deckhand Charlotte Smits Van Oyen cut quickly through heavy chop and onshore wind to the scene. A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter is also on its way. Amid the frantic radio chatter, the woman bellows that one of the sunken boaters is on her vessel, hitting and threatening to kill her boat mates. She requests permission to knock him out.

When Lockwood and Van Oyen arrive, five people are flailing in the water, including a father brawling with his 20-something son. Dad has apparently broken his son’s jaw. The man who made the threats has been punched in the face and thrown overboard. With blood pouring down his forehead, he is yelling at the crew of the Cha Cha Cha: “I’m going to kill you! You tried to kill me!”

Usually downed boaters, unlike many beachgoers, are grateful to rescuers; one has little pride or hope of saving himself while bobbing in the open ocean. But here the two guards are nervous about approaching their rescuees. Are they going to kill us if we try to rescue them? Lockwood shouts orders to shut up, while Van Oyen jumps in and starts recovering them with her buoy.

The lifeguards drag them on board, separate them and order them to mellow out. Another fight ensues and the lifeguards tie the son to a post, with the Coast Guard arriving in time to restrain the others.

The five men had apparently been drinking as they drove the speedboat from Avalon harbor to Newport Beach, Lockwood says. Halfway across, the father and son started arguing, and they stopped the boat to fight, even as the swell and chop were mounting. Cigarette boats--think “Miami Vice”--are only seaworthy when moving forward. Their decks are low, and if kept stationary, they can take on water in heavy seas.

Which is what happened. The Cha Cha Cha, at full sail, spotted five bloodied men waving from the sinking powerboat. They dragged three aboard, including the father, who immediately started swinging at the crew. The father jumped back in to find his son, and the crew, tired of the ungrateful visitors, kicked them back into the water and threw them a rope.

While Lockwood takes the others to waiting paramedics in San Pedro, the Coast Guard flies the broken-jawed man to the hospital. According to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, the rescued boaters could face felony assault charges. “That was a tense 15 minutes,” says Lockwood. “It’s still kind of a mystery to me why it happened.”

*

ON STORMY DAYS, RIPTIDES CAN LINE UP SIDE by side, and it can seem like everything is getting sucked out to sea. And the currents are wily. They can disappear with a set of waves, only to pop up and snare people farther down the beach.

This is what lifeguard Jon Van Duinwyk, 28, learns one summer day at Pt. Dume. It’s August 1997, warm and crowded on the beach, with a good-sized swell rolling in from the Southern Hemisphere. Van Duinwyk issues warnings about waves and riptides and corrals all the beach-going kids in a calm area near his tower. Two rip currents that siphon out to sea on either side of the group are a good 200 yards away.

The beaches at Zuma and Pt. Dume are less sheltered than most in the county. Waves crash harder, and lateral currents can sweep down the beach faster than you can walk or swim. Lifeguards periodically have to perform what are called “blitz rescues,” when whole crowds of people get into trouble.

About 20 kids are playing in front of Van Duinwyk when a 6-foot wave sneaks in and blasts them. Arms, legs and heads are swallowed, swirled and spit out of the whitewash. “A hand grenade of humans exploding,” the lifeguard later recalls.

As more waves crash, the water needs to escape. A riptide forms and takes the group out to sea. Van Duinwyk jumps in the water without fins and orders the kids to swim laterally and then into the beach--universal advice when stuck in a riptide.

About 12 of them are strong enough swimmers to do it. The other eight are not. Got to keep them calm, he thinks. He approaches each with his orange float, saying, “I’m a lifeguard. You’re safe, grab this.”

Panicked victims pose a serious danger to lifeguards. They start grabbing for anything, even the air, as if climbing an imaginary ladder. They will pull down lifeguards who get too close.

Van Duinwyk has some of the kids in a bear hug and more on his float. He barely keeps his own head out of the water. He’s about to pass out. One girl with long, sharp nails frantically claws his skin. He wants to drift out to the mushroom head of the riptide, but the girl is desperate to get back to shore.

If a set rolls in, he will lose them all.

Two other guards arrive and the trio divvies up the victims for the swim in from 150 yards out. It is such a long haul that Van Duinwyk, towing two kids, is hyperventilating when he reaches the shore. What beach am I on? he wonders. He lies down to get some air.

The kids disperse to their parents, who never seem to know what happened. “On that rescue,” says Van Duinwyk, “I didn’t even get one thank you.”