You are [del]what[/del] who you [del]eat[/del] drink.
When you look up some of this summer’s drowning victims, it looks mostly like people who are just unprepared for the awesome power of the Great Lakes. I would think that people who are used to big waters and big currents would have a better idea of how much power waves can have.
Ontario has had 92 drownings this year with a big surge in pool deaths during June and July prompting a coroner’s review. A good chunk of the drownings have been on the Great Lakess or Georgian Bay.
Of 6 or so I quickly skimmed over online: two were foreign visitors (16 and 10) the latter of which fell out of a canoe on Georgian Bay which can get as choppy as any of the GLs. Two were described as being in “rough waters”, one (a woman from Calgary) in “choppy waters”, and one was a kid who fell out of a boat that suddenly hit “extreme rough waters” on a river.
This year they’ve had about 12 people die in pools, mostly kids, and that’s being attributed to the unusually hot temperatures and more people doing stuff on or near water. According to stats, normally more adults die in drowning accidents in Ontario.
More heavy rains (a lot of rain all at once) that usual are also messing with the currents of a lot of waterways, plus there’s the accompanying wind. We’ve had a lot of 1.5 metre (5 foot) waves this year.
I think those must be the same kind of people who get killed in avalanches every year. Somehow I’ve lived for 20 years right next door to the Rockies without dying of an avalanche - it can be done!
In case this helps illustrate the size of the Great Lakes, and why they act more like freshwater seas than lakes, Lake Superior is bigger than Tasmania.
This is crazy but it happens more often than you would think.
Lake Michigan devours her wounded is a book I have been reading, written by Tom Rau, USCG Chief, a chilling and insightful account of how easily one can get into trouble while boating or swimming in the Great Lakes. If you are a recreational boater this is a must read.
Locally this has been another infamous year for rip curent deaths in SW lower Michigan.
I can’t feel that sorry for the kind of assholes who ignore warning signs because they think the’re more special than everybody else. Good on the lakes for showing them that they’re not. These are the kind of assholes who text in movie theaters and don’t use turn signals either. Hooray for natural selection.
The Coast Guard is great, as is Sheboygan County Sheriff department. It was their combined team that saved my ass when my ill-fated attempt to rescue that little girl went further wrong earlier this year.
I gotta get that book!
I think the word “lake” is deceptive for the Great Lakes. If they were salt water they’d probably be called inland seas. (Well, maybe not… see “Great Salt Lake” of Utah…)
Yes, significant wave effects. We have storms with “wave effects” sufficient strong to break up and sink freighters designed to handle open ocean waters. Any one of the Great Lakes can be every bit as dangerous as sailing on the open ocean given conditions that occur surprisingly often. Near shore are rip currents, much like ocean “rip tides”, that can pull even the strongest swimmers out into the lake to drown (in fact, this week the local radio and TV have been warning about rip currents in Lake Michigan - we’ve still had several drownings in the Chicago area this summer due to them. We also get high surf/wave warnings and other fun stuff.
Then, in the winter time, the water gets cold enough to kill. You need the same type of survival suits worn by fishermen in the Bering Sea and Alaska to survive falling overboard in winter. I’ve actually stood on the shore in Chicago and seen ice floes or even just solid ice all the way out to the horizon.
Sometimes the Lakes are gentle and safe to swim. Other times they are not. In some areas the bottom is paved in shipwrecks. The Great Lakes really do need a little more respect.
One problem with big lakes (not restricted to great lakes) is how very fast conditions can change. One moment you are canoing along happily; the next, the wind picks up and veers, and suddenly you are in trouble.
I’ve canoed for many years up north in the Temiskaming/Kippawa region, and many’s the time I’ve experienced this.
The worst disaster I’m aware of happened many years ago on lake Temiskaming, where an enire troop of boy’s school canoers along with their teacher died, canoing on the lake when the water was cold.
The proximate reason: the lake is very long and narrow, essentially just a widening of the Ottawa river; when the wind is blowing across the lake - no problem; but if the wind shifts, and blows down the lake - big waves. Hypothermia did for the boys and teacher.
A quick bit of googling reveals that 40 foot (12 meter) waves were reported on Lake Superior the night the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, and 50 foot (15 meter) waves are believed possible. Just FYI.
Not to be too gross - but people who have fallen into Lake Michigan as far north as Milwaukee, Wisconsin have been known to literally wash up on the beach down here in northern Indiana. Needless to say, this is alarming to sunbathers and waders from Gay to Michigan City.
It’s pretty much certain that if a drunk tourist falls off Navy Pier in Chicago on New Year’s Eve they’ll show up in Gary around mid to late May.
Definitely fresh water. Get far enough away from the cities on the shore you can dip up a bucket while sailing and have yourself a drink.
That may account for one or two survivals where people have been stranded in the big lakes for a couple days before rescue - you don’t get dehydrated like you would in the ocean. Water water everywhere and every drop you can drink. Of course, the downside is that in most of the Lakes for most of the year the water is cold enough to kill you in just a few minutes via hypothermia.
Depends on where on the lake you are. On the south end of Lake Michgan we get rip currents that can pull you out, away from shore, as well as parallel or to the shore. They do account for some drownings every year.
As a further reference for our foreign friends - several times a year the Chicago area gets winds blowing steady 80-100 kph and gusting higher than that. I do recall two occassions with wind gusts into the 125-130 kph range on a clear, cloudless day. During storms we can have gusts up to 150-160 kph - not tornados, not microburst, just plain old gusts of wind. That’s the same as a category two hurricane (typhoon, to those of you in other hemispheres). No, we don’t actual hurricanes, but we do get some mighty winds around here. They can really whip up the waves.
Which is not to say the place is always a wind tunnel. Some days the air is completely calm.
Hey, if you like variable weather THIS is the place to live!
Yep.
Couple years ago a German tourist in Milwaukee paddled out onto Lake Michigan with one of those really cheap blow-up air mattresses. He was picked up several days later, badly sunburned, off shore from Chicago. Apparently, he had attempted to paddle across the big lake as he had absolutely no clue how big it it really was. It was, after all, “just” a lake, right?
He was lucky. Just hungry and sunburned, but eventually safe. At least he could drink the water so he was actually in pretty good shape when the coast guard finally found him.
I mostly agree with you. But overwhelmingly the drownings around here seem to be teenagers. Teenagers are just stupid. I feel really horrible for their parents, especially the ones of the kids who just came up here for their first year of college.
Lake Superior is cold enough to kill all year round. Even in August, away from the shore, the water is about 42 degrees on average if I’m remembering right.
Here’s an article from today in the Detroit News about how Rip tides kill 25 in Great Lakes this year with a side mention that 68 folks have drowned in Lake Michigan alone since January 1 2010.
I disagree, looking at the news stories about the Ontario, the “teen” demographic doesn’t actually seem over-represented. A huge chunk of the stories I’ve read were people 30 or older, more children than usual and the most of the teens I’ve read about were on family trips and not necessarily goofing around recklessly with other teens.
There was a father and son who drowned in Lake Huron. The son was 5, I assume the father wasn’t a teen. Other ages of people who drowned April through August include: 31, 24, 39, 84, 53, 43, 59, 63, 73, 21, 26, 10, 12, 6, toddler (age not specified), and 4.
When it comes to teenagers:
13-year-old drowned in the family pool (adults present),
17-year-old died of hypothermia after falling into the COLD water in Algonquin Park
16-year-old exchange student (swimming despite posted “Danger!” signs)
13-year-old who got bounced out of a boat (adults present)
18-year-old was also in the earlier post as one of the “rough water deaths”
Two 14-year-olds died together in a condo pool when one who couldn’t swim accidentally jumped in the deep end, his friend tried to rescue him.
19 year-old woman who was drinking and swimming alone
Maybe three of them were “stupid” but the rest were either unlucky or were were with adults. No so much "stupid.
And an interesting stat is that usually only 9-10% of drownings, in Canada, happen in a pool.
What freaks me out about drownings is how often people are nearby and don’t notice. Apparently, death by drowning isn’t very spectacular - not a lot of splashing, etc.
If the person could stay above water, they wouldn’t drown.
And once the victim slips under the surface there’s not much to see.
I guess what surprises me a bit is that the transition from the one state to the other generally is not accompanied by a lot of hoopla.
I was talking about locally - thus the “around here.” Of the 4 people who drowned this year, three were teens. I don’t have previous year stats handy, but every year or two at least one or two college freshmen drown here, usually at the same beach.
The Great Lakes range from 4.4 to 18.7 times the area of the Great Salt Lake - so they might well be “seas” if they were salty.
Now all the local newscasts are running ‘special reports’ on the many drowning this summer. Last night I got to sit through two different recountings of Sofia’s sad loss earlier this year.
<<sigh>>
If it helps save someone else it’s worth it, but damn, it hits home.
As someone unfamiliar with the area and removed from the available local reports I found these numbers, especially the “68”, astonishing. How many total have drowned in all the Great Lakes this year?
Posting these stories here is probably far more beneficial than you realize for those of us that might vacation there sometime. The reality defies even the wildest preconception.