Look, i don’t know about the Florida beaches, but as i said above, here in San Diego foot patrols would reduce the effectiveness of the patrols on some of the beaches by about, say, 95 percent.
The beaches run for miles, and while the majority of the beachgoers tend to congregate in areas with lifeguard stations, plenty of people swim and surf and sunbathe in the long stretches between the main bathing areas. To cover these areas, the lifeguards have to patrol, and if they were to do it on foot they couldn’t take all their rescue and medical equipment with them, and they could also be ten minutes away when an emergency call comes. The long stretches also have plenty of room for them to drive without running over people.
I spent about 5 years in Volusia county and alot of time at the beaches both driving on them and lying on them.
You have to be one hell on an unattentive driver to run over a sun bather. The beach is flat, it’s the solid color of sand, you’re driving a straight line, anything in front of you is visable for hundreds of feet, and you’re driving slowly. If you run over some stationary object you are a moron.
Maybe a child running in front of your vehicle at the last second on a crowded beach but a lone sunbather?
Easy problem to solve, in Australia we patrol beaches between the flags. These are placed so they are away from rips etc. Although in Aus our life guards are volunteers in the main.
Remember we are a beach culture in Australia and as such there are a lot of people who surf etc away from patrolled areas but it is their risk. In no way would we expect life guards in isolated areas.
OH and 5miles an hour and ONLY the front wheels went over her? Watch the fuck where you are going.:smack:
I’m wondering what the point of “patrolling” a long expanse of beach in a vehicle looking for incidents is. People who get into trouble in the water tend to do so quite quickly, and it strikes me that your chances of eyeballing the drowning dude in the five minutes between when he starts waving for help and when he slips quietly under the water are not all that good if you’re roaming round on a half-hour circuit.
Or maybe I’m missing something about the way they do this?
I grew up in Australia, and i’m well aware of how the beaches work there. Here in San Diego, things work fairly similarly. Each main beach area has flags and signs and stationary lifeguard towers, and most of the lifeguards have fixed posts where they watch the swimmers and surfers. There are swim zones and surf zones, and the lifeguards keep an eye on what is going on.
But there are also long stretches of beach where there are no fixed posts, and the beach patrol people often patrol those areas in vehicles. They are, as i have already said, miles long in some places.
Much of San Diego County’s coastline is one long beach, without clear geographic barriers. It’s not like, say, the beaches of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, where there are clear headlands and rocky outcroppings separating beaches like Bondi, Tamarama, Bronte, Clovelly, Coogee, etc. I can enter the north end of Bondi Beach and walk on the sand to the south end in about ten minutes. It’s not much more than half a mile long.
Here in San Diego, my wife and i walk on the beach a fair bit, and if you enter the south end of North Torrey Pines State Beach and walk north, it takes over an hour before you get to the other end, up at Del Mar. Further up the coast, in north county, the distances are even greater. Start at Moonlight Beach and walk north, and you can go for miles, especially if it’s not high tide.
I realize that there are places in Australia where the beaches also go for miles. I used to spend Christmas Day on Hawks Nest Beach, north of Newcastle, and i spent time in my youth camping at Seven Mile Beach at the mouth of the Shoalhaven River. But San Diego County combines these long beaches with great weather and the sixth-largest population of any county in the United States. That warrants keeping an eye on even the less populated parts of the beach.
People who swim or surf outside of the designated areas know that they do so at their own risk, but the beach patrol still drives up and down the beach keeping an eye on things. I wouldn’t want dozens of trucks and SUVs on the beach all the time, but even at the height of summer i’ve never known the patrol vehicles to cause any problem to beachgoers. As long as the drivers watch where the fuck they’re going, i just don’t see what the big deal is.
Even somebody being careful and watching where they are going is ONCE in a great while is just going to screw up. And not due to stupidity or somesuch. Just because humans are not perfect. Heck, parents that love their kids more than their own life once in a great while run over one or leave em in the hot car or insert disaster here…
Human vision is not perfect (look up blind spot for some edification). Human mental processing certainly isn’t either.
If the “driver over” was driving like an idiot or checking out the guy in speedo or whatever that would be one thing. But, even IF they were being careful, there is a low but non-zero chance of major fuck up. Enough careful people doing this and statistics say bad shit is gonna happen. Humans are way more falable (even with the best of intentions) than I think most people realize.
I’m not all that familiar with lifeguard procedures and such (so this is ALL speculation based on observation), but my impression of how they use the pickups on the beach is that they’re not primarily patrolling or policing in them.
They’re mostly for emergency response and are driven by the higher-ups that have the most training/experience/certifications. (The driver in this incident was a Lieutenant that’s worked for the city for 24 years.) I also get the impression that the people who drive them are also supervising all the lifeguards in the towers.
We have plenty of beach around here, but it being Ft. Lauderdale, there aren’t really any long desolate stretches of beach that require a roving patrol. The place where this happened is directly in front of the Bahia Mar hotel and marina, and is probably one of the most regularly crowded areas of the beach in the city. (Even with that section of the beach being significantly wider than most others in the area.) Not only do patrons of the hotel and marina make use of that part of the beach, but there is also a larger than normal amount of public parking spaces right there.
So this is totally not an incident of a vehicle patrolling a normally empty area where one wouldn’t expect beachgoers laying in the sand. In fact, in this case, the lady was run over while lying immediately adjacent to a regularly manned lifeguard tower.
To give people an idea, I headed over to Panoramio. There are two lifeguard towers in that immediate area, so she was right next to either this tower, or this tower. And here’s a wider shot of what that area of the beach looks like on an average day.
(ETA: In that first shot, you can actually see the tower from the second shot in the background, to get an idea of how close those two towers are.)
Oh yeah, also in that first shot, you can see one of the pickups in question, as well as an ATV. That type of 6-wheel ATV is not all that common, though. They usually use the much more conventional type of 4-wheel ATV’s.
So what? People are fallible — we all know that. That still means the lifeguard fucked up – badly.
And I disagree at least in part with your premise. People being careful and watching where they are going do NOT run over people unless there is some catastrophic mechanical failure. They might GET hit, if the don’t see something coming in time to avoid it. But by definition, if you run down a prone, non-moving person on a beach you are not paying attention. Or, if you don’t have time to react once you do see them, you are going too fast.
So let me reiterate my question: why do they not have designated trails/roadways for vehicles that are clearly marked? People don’t lay down on the roadway, and vehicles don’t drive anywhere else (except in an emergency).
I take you have NEVER been looking right at something…looking for that very something and just…not…fracking…seen it…even when…you were staring…right…fracking…at …the very fracking…thing…you were looking for…and after many moments…you went…oh frack…there it is…right fracking there in front of you…?
Sure…
Human eyesight and the mind are not as infallable as you think they are.
The way to prevent tragedies is to have multiple layers of “don’t fuck ups”. Being careful or “paying attention” doesn’t cut it..
So let me reiterate my question: why do they not have designated trails/roadways for vehicles that are clearly marked? People don’t lay down on the roadway, and vehicles don’t drive anywhere else (except in an emergency).
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Because there aren’t that many vehicles traveling that frequently to justify the cost, loss of space available to beachgoers, and the negative aesthetics.
IMO, they should just ditch the pickups on the beach all together, and get some small trailers for the ATV’s if they need more space to carry equipment.
How do you “clearly” mark a road on a beach of shifting sand, thousands of strolling tourists, and high tides and bog waves? With a shitload* of daily maintenance, maybe, which the lifeguards probably don’t have tome to do if they need to drive their routes as it is.
*Hey! Google Chrome doesn’t mark “shitload” as a misspelling. I never noticed before.
That is correct. When I have driven, for 30 plus years now, and there is a human being who is not moving in front of my car within range of being hit, I have never failed to notice it.