An Affirmative Action Everyone Can Support

At times, even Destiny discriminates.

So far this year, four Orange County residents have drowned in swimming pools and in the ocean. All were Latinos.

A 2-year-old boy nearly drowned in April. He’s Latino too.

A statistical anomaly, perhaps. But the racial cluster in drownings this year reinforces a haunting fear of safety experts: Latinos are not getting the message about the dangers of going into the water.

Overall, total drowning deaths have declined in Orange County during the ‘90s, thanks in part to an aggressive public education campaign about water safety. Now, authorities are preparing to attack the problem among Latinos with a similar campaign in Spanish. They hope to match the results of the English-language effort that helped cut overall county drownings from a high of 15 in 1993 to seven last year.

This is one affirmative action program we can all get behind.

The new campaign will include a safety video that went into production this week, with filming at various sites in the county. But it won’t be a literal translation of the English version, titled “Three Tragic Seconds.” The Spanish script, written by my friend Sofia Negron of Irvine, addresses real-life circumstances.

Most Latinos don’t have private pools, for example. They live in crowded apartments with swimming pools and spas shared by all tenants. So they have to deal with careless residents who defeat safety gates for convenience, breaking the locks or propping them open.

Often, it’s up to absentee landlords to keep apartment pools up to code, with required fencing and self-locking gates. But many Latinos are reluctant to force building managers to comply with safety rules, says Octavio Medina, public education officer with the Santa Ana Fire Department.

“They never say anything. They don’t speak up. They never complain,” says Medina, who will appear on the new Spanish video.

Awareness is the key to water safety. But many immigrants are not accustomed to being around pools in their home countries, says Dr. Alberto Gedissman, an Argentine immigrant who’s in charge of pediatric outpatient care at Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

They get overconfident, Gedissman told me Thursday after being interviewed for the new video. They don’t appreciate the risks.

Children ages 1 to 4 are at the highest risk of drowning. And that has county safety experts especially worried, because Latinos constitute the largest segment within that vulnerable age group. And the numbers are growing, say analysts at the Orange County Health Care Agency.

A specific adult must always be assigned to watch children in the water, experts advise. Sadly, some parents assume that their children will be safe because other people happen to be in and around the pool. That can be a deadly miscalculation.

To quote the safety slogan: “Children drown without a sound.”

“Children have drowned with crowds in the pool,” says Mary Marlin, a private consultant hired to help with the Spanish campaign. “They’re not even noticed going underwater.”

‘Nobody Saw Him’

That’s what happened May 18 to a 6-year-old Latino boy who apparently slipped underwater unnoticed in a busy pool at his parents’ Anaheim condominium. As a witness said at the time: “Everybody was there, but nobody saw him.”

When little children submerge, they don’t flail and splash. They just silently lose consciousness, often in less than a minute, says Marlin, who launched the original safety campaign in 1993 when she was in charge of CHOC’s community education department.

CHOC is now spearheading the Spanish counterpart. The need for a bilingual approach was seen from the start, Marlin says. But the funds only recently became available.

When it comes to pool safety, lack of money also can make a life-or-death difference to families. Poor people are less likely to afford swimming classes for their children, for example.

In one of the saddest deaths this year, a Latina woman and her 4-year-old daughter drowned together in a community pool in Aliso Viejo. The 23-year-old mother from Mexico didn’t know how to swim. She didn’t even own a swimming suit. She died wearing a T-shirt and shorts.

In a water emergency, wet and heavy street clothing make it even harder to take victims out of the water after they lose consciousness. In a rescue attempt, those first minutes are precious. CPR must be started before the lack of oxygen causes permanent damage to a victim’s brain.

Help didn’t come in time for a 2-year-old girl whose mother found her floating in a private pool in Brea in 1987. The girl suffered brain damage that left her a quadriplegic, confined to a care home in Garden Grove, according to records of the Orange County coroner.

The girl died of pneumonia on May 29, 13 years after nearly drowning as a baby. She had just turned 15.

She was not Latina, but her tragic case illustrates the importance of quickly giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a drowning victim. The Spanish video will stress the need for Latinos to learn this simple but critical skill.

Safety experts and a video crew gathered Wednesday to shoot CPR scenes at the Yorba Linda home of producer Ed Royce. His adopted baby boy, who happens to be Latino, served as an actor in a poolside scene showing how dangerously close kids come to the water without sensing danger.

The toddler teetered at water’s edge and even dipped one foot in the pool with his little shoe still on. The scene was so lifelike it was creepy.

A Personal Tale

The day before, the crew had filmed outdoors at Laguna Niguel Regional Park with its large reservoir. Many Latinos frequently use such parks for family outings.

Royce told me he watched as a Latino family happened to pull up in a Ford Taurus. While the parents struggled with an infant, blankets and a cooler, two older boys dashed straight toward the lake.

“They parked, the doors opened and the kids scattered,” Royce said. “One was chasing ducks. The other was chasing the one chasing ducks. And the water was right there.”

It happens in an instant. A short lapse in supervision and someone sinks underwater. That’s exactly the way it happened to me.

I nearly drowned as a boy during a family vacation at Yosemite. While my parents picnicked, my brothers and I floated down a shallow stream on inflatable mattresses. When I felt I had drifted too far, I rolled off my raft--and sank straight down like a rock.

I had picked a deep diving spot to get off, and I couldn’t swim. I remember looking up at the glistening surface of the water so far above me. Somehow I made it to the top and tried to scream. But I just sank again and passed out.

The next thing I knew, I was being carried in the arms of a stranger who had dived in to save me. The man delivered me back to my frantic parents, who thanked him profusely.

Ironically, my father had been a champion swimmer in Mexico. Which only proves this can happen to anybody. For all groups, the safety steps recommended to prevent drownings are exactly the same.

“Human beings, when they go under the water, they drown,” Marlin says. “Ethnicity doesn’t matter.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.