Child drownings prompt safety calls

On a recent Saturday, 2-year-old Julio Cesar Guerra Jr. was riding a toy around the pool deck of his parents’ Norwalk home while they worked nearby. Shortly after 2 p.m., they found him, unresponsive, at the bottom of the family pool.

Julio was among four children who drowned in Los Angeles County in about a two-week span that included Southern California’s latest heat wave, according to coroner’s officials.

Among the others was 2-year-old Damien Mullins, who apparently climbed, unseen, over the fence around his family’s pool in Lancaster on Aug. 18, coroner’s officials said.

Abel Kealoha Estrada, 1, was last seen by his family lying on a bed next to his mother in La Puente on Aug. 15 while she napped before going to work a night shift. He was found in the pool by a sibling and died two weeks later in a hospital.

In Estrada’s case, “It appears the back door might have been left open for a period of time,” said Capt. Ed Winter, spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

Hailey Kong, 3, of Rancho Palos Verdes was found in cardiac arrest in a backyard pool Sept. 4. The pool’s cover apparently was not in place, Winter said.

So far this year in Los Angeles County, there have been 12 drownings of children aged 14 and younger, said Capt. Craig Harvey, a coroner’s office spokesman. Of those, 10 were in swimming pools or bathtubs; one was in Castaic Lake and one was in a bucket. In Riverside County, seven children have drowned this year; in Orange County, 10 have drowned.

Drowning is the leading cause of accidental death in children ages 1 to 4 in the United States, said Dr. Larry Baraff, professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. According to a study released in 2003 by the journal Pediatrics, about 1,400 youths aged 20 and younger drowned in 2000.

Also, a nine-year study from 1976 to 1984 by the Journal of the American Medical Assn. found that children ages 2 and 3 had the highest swimming pool drowning rate, about 8 per 100,000. Most child drownings occur in swimming pools, Baraff said.

“We’re more afraid of the ocean than we are of our own swimming pool,” Baraff said. “There tends to be more vigilance on the part of the parents as well as professional lifeguards watching all the time.”

Drownings, especially among children, often occur silently, experts say.

“A lot of times kids will accidentally fall into a pool or some kind of water environment,” said Capt. Terry Harvey, a spokesman for the lifeguard division of the L.A. County Fire Department. “Not being a swimmer, that doesn’t give him any time to scream, yell for help or show any sign of distress.”

Experts say two basic scenarios usually occur: In one, the child gains access to a non-gated or unprotected pool area. In the other, the child is playing in the pool, something happens, and nobody is watching.

“If you’re having a pool party for children, then there must be one person at all times whose responsibility is to be watching the children and acting as a lifeguard to make sure no child gets in trouble,” Baraff said.

Pool parties are potentially more dangerous because many parents are distracted or assume someone else is watching. And the hosts rarely hire lifeguards, Harvey said.

“Proper supervision would probably prevent a lot of these” drownings, Harvey said. At parties, “parents are doing their thing and lose track of their kids. It’s very easy to lose one person, have them sink and not be aware of it right away.”

And very young children “can die in a 5-gallon bucket, can drown in a sink, die in a bathtub,” Harvey said.

Experts recommend that people put a fence around a pool or put a cover on it, keep the water clean so that visibility is not hampered, and that pool owners learn CPR.

Another hazard is that children “can bang their head diving in or on the side of the pool, lose consciousness and drown,” Baraff said. “At age 10, most children can legitimately swim at least to get to the side of a pool.”

If a child is found to be unresponsive while in a pool, someone should immediately call 911 while another person administers CPR, Baraff said.

Baraff suggests someone quickly pull the child out of the water, turn him on his side to get as much fluid out of his mouth as possible, then lay him on his back and have a person use his mouth to cover the child’s nose and mouth while giving him 10 to 15 breaths.

Most important, said Capt. Mike Brown, spokesman for L.A. County Fire Department, “Never leave your child out in the pool for even just a second. . . . because it takes just that long for a child to succumb in the water and drown.”

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tami.abdollah@latimes.com