It happened on Sunday at 11:45 in the morning on a hot morning that invited the bathroom. A 60-year-old man was assisted by several witnesses, according to sources from the Emergency Information and Coordination Center, on the Cabo Roig beach in Oriola. The bather was unconscious and the people who helped him at the scene began to perform a cardiac massage. The CICU mobilized a SAMU unit whose medical team continued advanced cardiopulmonary resuscitation and other stabilization techniques; but there was no response, the 60-year-old man had died.
It happens that, while many beaches in the Valencian Community have had a surveillance and lifeguard service since the beginning of June, every day or at least on the weekend, the eleven beaches of Orihuela, 17 kilometers long, will not have the service until this Thursday, June 15, when the contract with the Ambumar company enters into force, which will be in force until September 15.
Municipal sources indicate that the hours to be covered will be from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in June and in the first half of September and from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. in July and August, and the assigned staff will be around 30 people.
From the Valencian Federation of Rescue and First Aid, the lack of a common criterion in a service that is left to the discretion of each city council has been denounced on several occasions. Miriam, a lifeguard at Sagunto beach, explained to La Vanguardia from her surveillance post: “it doesn’t make sense that some beaches have lifeguards and others don’t when on weekends in June we have 60 or 70 percent occupancy; It’s negligence.”
The Royal Academy defines the word “negligence” as “omission of due care due to inaction or carelessness or due to incorrect, inadequate or insufficient action”. And the truth is that it does not seem logical that, for example, the City Council of neighboring Torrevieja has expanded its budget this year to have surveillance from June 1, while Orihuela maintains a calendar that has proven obsolete.
Ramón Fusté, leader of the Party for the Independence of Orihuela Costa, who exceeded 30% of the votes in the coastal polling stations but stayed at 4.56% in the whole municipality close to obtaining a councilor, denounces that “it is one of many public services that function with serious deficiencies”, and adds that they are preparing a protest “due to the non-existence of beach bars and toilets this summer”, given that the city council has not yet contracted the service.
The diversity of criteria is such that while most of the beaches in Castellón (the capital, Peñíscola, Benicàssim…) do not have a lifeguard until 11 in the morning, Benicarló starts at 10. Benidorm is the only municipality that has vigilance -greater or lesser- throughout the year. Meanwhile, Valencia has different hours depending on the area: from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the north, from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the south, and from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in La Devesa, information that most bathers do not have. .
Miriam explains that “it can be understood that, due to lack of budget, the service is implemented later during the week, but as the beaches are, every weekend in May and June there should be lifeguards.” In Sagunt, “we extended until 9 at night in July and August because we saw that there were a lot of people who bathed at that time.”
From her experience, the lifeguard misses not only that the criteria are unified and the calendar and schedules are adapted to reality, but also information and awareness campaigns that are conspicuous by their absence. The Valencian Community was the Spanish autonomy that registered the most drownings on its beaches in 2022, but “nobody talks about this.”
Bathers often do not heed the warnings of lifeguards, who lack the legal authority to enforce themselves, and “many do not take basic precautions such as drinking water, not staying in the sun for too long”, and this leads not only to drowning but also to to cardiac arrests and other serious problems that could be avoided with adequate prevention.
