Every summer, every day, tens of thousands of people gather on Catalan beaches to cool off with a swim. The influx has skyrocketed since the end of June due to the heat, which every year is more unbearable in urban centers. Among the powerful claims, the beauty and characteristics of the Catalan coast, from north to south, in a falsely harmless Mediterranean.
A shared place for socializing that unfortunately also turns into a tragic scene every summer. Since June 15, 14 bathers have drowned in Catalonia, five more than in the same period last year (9), according to Civil Protection data. And 2022 was not a good summer either: 25 people drowned.
The last victim, an 80-year-old man who drowned yesterday on Sant Gervasi beach in Vilanova i la Geltrú (Garraf). In the wake of the mortality, with figures that are also bad on the whole Spanish coast, the debate and the restlessness of the experts around the public rescue and first aid service emerges.
Resources are lacking, with fewer lifeguards than would be optimal, and there is a lack of a shared model to standardize the surveillance and rescue of beachgoers. A dynamic space, with sudden changes due to the weather and the state of the sea.
A pioneering research project, Beach safety (Platges segures), led by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), has uncovered deficiencies based on the analysis of data from the 431 beaches on the Catalan coast. With a great objective, in a positive way, to offer a scientific method to standardize surveillance.
Being able to have a standard system that allows you to know the necessary number of lifeguards on a given beach, of watchtowers, as well as their location and distance from each other, or if they should be fixed or mobile points because it is a sandy beach in front of a very changing sea. In short, being able to size the rescue service based on scientific evidence.
These are issues that are now established by each coastal municipality’s City Council. They do this through the technical conditions of the public contracts that are used each season to award the service to the half dozen private companies that offer it, in addition to the pioneering Red Cross. Companies, such as oenagé, do comply with the conditions set, but each municipality sets its own rules.
“There is a lack of lifeguards and signage on unsupervised beaches. There are many beaches that should have a lifeguard service and do not, some urban and very frequented. A global vision is missing, each City Council does what it wants and what it can based on its resources. It’s a problem of concept, of a model,” warns Pablo Martín Epifanio, who leads the Safe Beaches research with the Territorial Analysis and Tourist Studies Research Group (Gratet) of the Geography department of the URV.
One of the most critical issues is the response time, the time that elapses between a bather starting to drown, after fainting or seasickness at sea, among many other circumstances, and being rescued. “It’s a critical situation, in 30 seconds in the water you can drown”, emphasizes the researcher, with a long experience.
Improvement tools developed in the project by the URV and the company Auditek, a technical consultancy specializing in the management of aquatic facilities and beaches, are already being applied experimentally on some beaches, within the framework of the Government’s Industrial Doctorate Plan. “Surveillance models based on the occupation or density of incidents” are being developed, or following the possible relationship between drownings and the resources allocated.
“The management system of the surveillance and rescue service on the beaches in Catalonia is antiquated, we have stayed where we were 25 years ago and there have been few improvements. Most of the elderly victims are not detected by the rescuers but by the people around them; something goes wrong”, emphasized Ramsés Martí, rescue expert, on the Via Lliure program of RAC1. An expert in rescue, lifeguarding and life safety in the aquatic environment, he warns that a single lifeguard must watch over 80,000 square meters of sea on some beaches, the equivalent of eight football fields. “It is humanly impossible”.
The experts also agree that, no matter how many resources are allocated, bathing on the beaches cannot be monitored all the time, even on the 700 kilometers of beaches on the Catalan coast. The responsibility of bathers is key. Civil Protection highlights the importance of taking the flags into account, this is a unified criterion, with particular caution with the yellow flag, which allows entering the water but with caution in the face of waves or sea currents.
Civil Protection highlights, as factors that explain the high number of drowned people, the profile of the victims, many of whom are elderly, the bad state of the sea, with yellow and red flags, and the strong heat, with many bathers.
