Class 2

5/3/12

Today would have been the second class I attended, but I had to miss this class to go to a really important band concert. However, I still had to go over all the material I missed, so here's a summary of what I read:

• Effective surveillance is key in lifeguarding. There are several elements of effective surveillance including recognition of dangerous behaviors (things like a weak swimmer bobbing in water over their head,  crawling hand over hand to the deep end or a child left unattended), victim recognition (being able to recognize when someone is in trouble), effective scanning (watching the whole pool without being distracted), zone surveillance (covering your assigned zone of the pool) and effective use of lifeguard stations.
• There are three types of potential victims, distressed swimmers, active drowning victims, and passive drowning victims. Distressed swimmers can keep their head above water, possibly wave for help and yell out, have an expression of concern, can breathe, have little or no forward motion and are less and less able to keep themselves up. Active drowning victims have their head tilted back towards the surface, struggle to stay at the surface, have an expression of panic and are wide-eyed, struggle to breathe, keep their arms to their sides and alternate them up and down, have no forward motion, cannot call out for help and they are either at the surface or sinking. Passive drowning victims are face up or face down in the water/ submerged, have limp or compulsive like movements, their eyes may be closed, are not breathing, have no motion, are either horizontal or vertical in the water, no forward motion, and cannot call for help.

Then the class spent the remaining two hours in the pool practicing how to rescue a passive drowning victim in deep water. This turned out to be a really challenging rescue and was even harder to learn by myself. Thankfully one of the other lifeguards helped me and I'm getting better at it. The primary lifeguard enters the pool and swims over to the victim, using a vertical in-water dive to quickly submerged and grab hold of the  victim. Then the primary lifeguard pulls on the excess rope of the buoy to reach the surface with the victim. Luckily this is a "two-person" rescue, so the secondary lifeguard (or back up) retrieves the backboard (after the primary calls for it) and grabs the victims' wrists so that the primary can get out and slide the backboard into place. Both lifeguards grab a wrist and begin to pull the backboard out of the water, careful to keep it close to the ground and set it down gently.