Every day, every summer, tens of thousands of people gather on the Catalan beaches to cool off with a bath. The influx has skyrocketed since the end of June due to the heat, each year 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 socializing place that unfortunately also becomes a disastrous scene every summer. Since June 15, 14 bathers have drowned in Catalonia, five more than in the same period last year (9), according to data from Civil Protection. And 2022 was not a good summer either: 25 people drowned.
The last victim, an 80-year-old man drowned yesterday on the beach of Sant Gervasi in Vilanova i la Geltrú (Garraf). Under the mortality, with figures that are also being bad on the entire Spanish coast, the debate and concern of the experts around the public lifeguard service emerges.
There is a lack of resources, with fewer lifeguards than would be optimal, and there is a lack of a shared model to standardize the surveillance and rescue of bathers on the coast. A dynamic space, with sudden changes due to the weather and the state of the sea.
A pioneering research project, Beach Safety (safe beaches), led by the Rovira i Virgili University (URV), has exposed deficiencies based on the analysis of data from the 431 beaches on the Catalan coast. With a great objective, positively, to offer a scientific method to standardize surveillance.
Being able to have a standard system that allows knowing the necessary number of lifeguards on a certain beach, watchtowers as well as their location and distance between them, or if they should be mobile or fixed points. In short, being able to dimension the lifeguard service based on scientific evidence.
These are issues that each coastal municipality council now establishes. They do so through the technical conditions of the public contracts that are used each season to award this service to the half dozen private companies that offer it, in addition to the Red Cross. Companies, such as the NGO, do comply with the conditions, but each municipality sets its 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 crowded. There is a lack of a global vision, each council does what it wants and what it can according to its resources. It is a problem of concept, of model”, warns Pablo Martín Epifanio, who leads the Safe Beaches research with the Grup de Recerca d’Anàlisi Territorial i Estudis Turístics (Gratet) of the Department of Geography (URV).
One of the most critical issues is the response time, the period of time between when a bather begins to drown, after suffering fainting or dizziness in the sea, among many other circumstances, and is rescued. "It is a critical situation, in 30 seconds you can drown", highlights the researcher, with extensive experience.
Improvement tools developed in the project by the URV together with the Auditek company, a technical consultancy specialized in the management of aquatic facilities and beaches, are already being applied experimentally on some beaches, within the framework of the Government's Pla de Doctorats Industrials. “Surveillance models based on occupancy or incident density,” or the possible relationship between drownings and resources, are being developed.
“The management system of the surveillance and rescue service on the beaches in Catalonia is outdated, we have stayed at 25 years ago and there have been few improvements. A large part of the elderly victims are not detected by lifeguards but by the people around them; something is failing”, highlighted Ramsés Martí, a rescue expert, in the Via Lliure program of RAC1. The expert warns that a single lifeguard must monitor up to 80,000 square meters of sea on some beaches, the equivalent of eight soccer fields. "It's humanly impossible," he added.
Experts also agree that, no matter how many resources are allocated, bathing on the beaches cannot be monitored all the time in the 700 kilometers of sand along the Catalan coast. The responsibility of bathers is key. Civil Protection highlights the importance of taking into account the flags, this criterion is unified, with special caution with the yellow one, which allows you to enter the water but with caution in the face of waves or currents.
Civil Protection stands out among the factors that explain the high number of drowning, the profile of the victims, many of whom are elderly, the bad state of the sea at the beginning of summer, with yellow and red flags, and the strong heat, with many bathers cooling off on the beaches.
