Building more pools could save lives

As a young child in New Orleans, Raychelle Ross fell into one of the city’s many canals and nearly drowned.

Years later, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the city, Ross fled the rising waters on a bus with two tiny babies in tow.

In 2016, one of those children, Bennasia, drowned in a backyard pool. “I don’t play with water,” Ross told me. “I’ve always been afraid.”

Bennasia was one of the estimated 4,000 people who die by drowning every year across the United States in a public health crisis America has largely ignored. As summers grow hotter, taking a dip at the nearest swimming hole could offer some of the balm that this weary, divided country needs: a chance to cool off and play together, to get healthier, to have some fun. Instead, the United States is, for a majority of its citizens, a swimming desert where, according to a Red Cross survey, more than half of the population lacks basic swimming abilities and millions are without access to safe places to enter the water. Many in Black American families don’t know how to swim or don’t know how to swim well. Millions of Americans of other races don’t, either. On average, 11 people die by drowning every day.

After years of inaction by the authorities, this rolling American disaster is finally beginning to draw some of the attention needed to save lives. A coalition of experts this summer published the first ever U.S. Water Safety Action Plan, a much-needed 10-year national road map to reduce drowning. The United States is one of the few developed countries in the world without such a plan. Some recommendations, like increasing the use of life jackets in lakes, oceans and rivers, could be carried out by states and local governments. Others — like the creation of a public health surveillance system to collect better data around drowning — are worthy of urgent action from the White House and Congress.

Hiding in plain sight, though, is a much larger opportunity to significantly reshape the way we live with the water around us, in the country’s biggest cities, in its most remote rivers and lakes and in its suburbs. The United States doesn’t have to accept these deaths. Nor does it have to retreat from the water to save lives.

America can build more public pools. It can transform natural bodies of water into safer places to swim. It can subsidize swimming lessons and raise pay for lifeguards, making the job more attractive. The United States can build a culture of swimming instead of one of drowning.

The national data, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is sobering: Drowning is the leading cause of death among 1- to 4-yearolds, the second-leading cause of accidental deaths by injury among children 5 to 14, and the third-leading cause of accidental death by injury for Americans 24 years and younger. Younger Black adolescents are more than three times as likely to drown as their white peers; Native American and Alaskan Native young adults are twice as likely to drown as white Americans.

Yet the work of water safety has largely been left to nonprofit groups, which, no matter how dedicated, cannot reach every American. Requiring a federal agency to oversee drowning prevention policy and build a better public health surveillance system around drowning deaths would be a good start. But the transformative move would be to build far more public pools across the United States.

There are just 309,000 public swimming pools in the United States, according to a CDC estimate. That figure includes pools that belong to condo complexes, hotels and schools, so the number of pools truly accessible to the public is even smaller. The biggest reason so many Americans can’t swim is that they have too few places to learn to do so. The problem has been exacerbated in recent years by a national lifeguard shortage, leading to partly closed beaches and public pools.

One reason drowning rates are so high is that when a safe place to swim isn’t readily available, Americans often enter the water anyway, seeking relief from the heat wherever they can. In New York City alone, at least four teenagers have drowned since 2010 trying to swim in the Bronx River. The Bronx is home to more than 1.4 million people but has just eight open public pools. That’s about one pool for every 175,000 people.

The United States over the past 50 years has adopted critical public health campaigns — from seat belt use to banning cigarette smoking in most bars and restaurants — that have saved millions of lives. Yet a lack of basic safety instruction around swimming in the United States has left Americans of all backgrounds less safe around the water.

Experts say much more can be done to save lives, like building public pools, expanding water safety education and creating designated swimming areas at lakes and rivers in rural communities to help people know where it’s safer to swim, and where it isn’t.

In a testament to the enormous value of public swimming pools, wealthier communities across the United States never stopped investing in them.

Coral Gables, Florida, has a colossal, stone-ringed public pool known as the Venetian, complete with waterfalls and grottoes. Austin, Texas, boasts a 3-acre public pool fed by underground springs. Ann Arbor, Michigan, has public pools with giant waterslides.

Every American deserves the chance to swim somewhere just as nice.