It’s swim at your own risk
With lifeguards so scarce, it is beach season that desperately needs rescuing, experts say
MILWAUKEE — On the first week of June in Wisconsin, beachgoers on a neatly groomed Lake Michigan shore strolled past volleyball nets on rainbow-striped poles and a waterfront cafe.
Only one thing was missing. Instead of traditional wooden lifeguard stands, there was a cherry-red life preserver and a sign: “No lifeguard on duty. Swim at your own risk.”
Lifeguards are frustratingly scarce this year, leaving tens of thousands of the nation’s pools closed and beaches unguarded, and the public distanced from a stalwart of the American summer.
In Milwaukee County, a network of public pools is more closed than open.
At least five facilities have been shuttered, and four pools will be open to the public, officials said.
At popular beaches on Lake Michigan, swimmers must navigate crashing waves and dangerous riptides on their own.
The hiring woes stretch across the country: Officials in Austin, Texas, said they have yet to find willing lifeguards for half of the 750 positions they hope to fill. In Cincinnati, hiring fell so short that only eight of the city’s 23 pools could open.
“It feels like a problem that is unsolvable,” said Jim Tarantino, the deputy director of Milwaukee County Parks, which manages the city’s pools, said of the closures. “We’re as devastated as the community is.”
City officials and industry experts point to a crush of factors driving the lifeguard shortage. A low unemployment rate has given young people plentiful job options. Because of COVID-19-related limits during the pandemic, swimming lessons and lifeguard courses were often suspended for parts of the last two years, poking holes in an already weak training pipeline. And employers are choosing from a smaller group of applicants: In states like Wisconsin, there are simply fewer teenagers than in decades past, as residents have increasingly chosen to have smaller families.
“It’s the worst we’ve ever seen it,” said Bernard Fisher, director of health and safety at the American Lifeguard Association, who added that one-third of the nation’s beaches and pools are affected by the shortage.
Even for pools that are staying open, many are canceling swim lessons and assigning their instructors to work as lifeguards, complicating the training issue in the future. “If we don’t keep training new lifeguards all summer, it’s going to be a long time before we get out of this,” Fisher said.
Desperate for help, cities and private employers have dangled perks and raised hourly wages. Six Flags St. Louis has offered up to $18 an hour to lifeguards and promised a $500 bonus. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Parks Department covered the cost of lifeguard training this year, helping to attract enough applicants to staff its pools.
In New Orleans, known for its sweltering, humid summers, lifeguards are paid $15.91 an hour, a jump from just under $12 an hour last year, said Larry Barabino Jr., the chief executive of New Orleans Recreation Development Commission, the organization that runs the city’s parks and pools.
“We’ve been on the news, we’ve been on social media, we’ve been on the radio,” Barabino said.
But it has not worked. Only five of the city’s 13 seasonal pools will be open this summer.