The best bet for water safety for boaters is wearing a life jacket.
Earlier this year, a boat carrying five people swamped in Lake Livingston when it took a wave over its gunwale, filled with water, rolled and tossed the occupants into what was the churning, confused waters of the sprawling reservoir on the Trinity River about 90 miles northeast of Houston.
The boat foundered and was lost, but the five people aboard survived the ordeal.
Earlier this month, again on Lake Livingston, a trio of boaters — a man, woman and 14-year-old boy — trying to navigate open water turned to a seething cauldron by wind generated from a late-afternoon summer thunderstorm had their small vessel overwhelmed and capsize, pitching them into the lake just as dusk fell. They, too, survived — two of them plucked from the water more than seven hours after their craft foundered.
Those eight victims, involved in two of the 106 boating-related accidents documented in Texas through the first six months of this year, owe their survival to a simple act water safety experts say could reduce the number of boating-related fatalities by perhaps as much as 75 percent or more. All were wearing life jackets — personal flotation devices, or PFDs — when they went into the water.
“Wearing a PFD is the most basic and easiest thing every boater can do to improve safety on the water,” said assistant commander Cody Jones, boating law administrator with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s law enforcement division.
Annually, drowning accounts for 65 percent to 80 percent of boatingrelated fatalities. Longterm data compiled by the U.S. Coast Guard indicates about 85 percent of those drowning victims were not wearing a life jacket. And those figures jibe with the sobering statistics TPWD game wardens, charged with enforcing the state’s water safety laws and shouldering the grim duty of dealing with accident aftermath, have compiled over the decades.
“About three-quarters of the fatalities from boatingrelated incidents are from drowning, with trauma accounting for almost all of the rest,” Jones said.
Fatalities way down
The eight people involved in the two abovementioned incidents easily could have added to those somber statistics had they not opted to wear the PFDs Texas law requires be onboard for every occupant. And their actions and survival almost certainly played a role in what, so far, has been a much less deadly year for boaters on Texas waters than any in recent memory.
A little more than halfway through the year, Texas has recorded 12 boating-related fatalities, Jones said.
Over the same period this past year, Texas had seen 31 boating-related fatalities and was on its way to a total of 45 fatal incidents, one of the highest in recent years and significantly higher than the average of around 30 over the past decade or so.
This year, no fatal boating-related incidents occurred on Texas waters over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, July 4th and the weekends either side of that midsummer holiday. Most years, those holiday periods see the year’s highest numbers of recreational boaters on the water, and almost invariably include multiple fatal incidents.
Multiple factors
Why the lower loss of life this year?
“I wish I could say for certain,” Jones said. “There are probably a lot of things at work — weather conditions, timing of the holiday (July 4th occurred midweek) and other factors. We like to see zero fatalities and one’s too many. But we’re glad to see the reduction.”
The number of fatal boating accidents in Texas has been declining slowly but steadily over the past couple of decades, falling from an annual average of 54 over the five-year period of 1997-2001 to around 30 over the past decade.
While fatal incidents have declined sharply, the number of boating-related accidents, non-fatal injuries and violations of boating laws have remained fairly steady, a statistic that looks pretty good considering the number of watercraft in Texas has climbed significantly over the past two decades.
As of the first week of July, TPWD game wardens have documented 106 boating accidents resulting in 51 injuries. A year ago at the same time, the agency had tallied 111 accidents and 52 injuries.
While the number of accidents and injuries haven’t changed considerably over the past several years, the type of accidents and the boats involved have changed.
Little more than a decade ago, personal watercraft — generically termed “jet skis” — accounted for an out-sided percentage of boating accidents and fatalities. That has changed as Texas and other states imposed tighter regulations on operation of personal watercraft (PWCs), limiting their use to daylight hours and requiring all persons aboard wear personal flotation devices, employ the vessel's emergency engine cut-off switch (kill switch) and prohibiting operating a PWC at anything but idle speed within 50 feet of another boat, the bank or any person or object.
The number of boating incidents involving PWCs has substantially decreased over the past decade, Jones said. But a boom in use of paddlecraft — kayaks, canoes, paddleboards — and their use by often inexperienced boaters has led to a steep increase in those vessels being involved in accidents, Jones said.
Nationally over the past several years, about a half percent of boating fatalities have involved paddlecraft. In Texas over the past four years, 43 percent of boating fatalities have involved paddlecraft, Jones said.
Almost all of those fatalities came from drowning, he said. And almost all could have been prevented if boaters had worn PFDS.
“In a lot of cases, especially with kayaks, even experienced paddlers will tell you it’s not a question of if you’re going to get wet — turn over the boat or fall out — it’s a question of when,” Jones said. It can be a challenge to climb back into a tipped kayak or canoe.
“The simple solution is to wear a life jacket,” Jones said.
Texas boating law requires every vessel to have Coast Guard–approved PFDs for every person aboard any watercraft, including paddlecraft. But it requires PFDs to be worn at all times only by those younger than 13 and those aboard personal watercraft.
Even those minimal PFD rules aren’t followed by many boaters. The most common citation TPWD wardens write for water safety law violation involves not having the required number of PFDs aboard a vessel, Jones said. TPWD wardens has issued about 1,700 such citations each of the past two years.
Another top violation is not following the requirement that boat passengers younger than 13 wear a PFD any time the vessel is underway. This past year, TPWD wardens issued 602 citations for violation of that regulation. And that number has held fairly steady over the past few years.
“It’s disappointing,” Jones said of boaters who violate the PFD requirement for youngsters.
The effectiveness of widespread PFD use by all boaters in reducing boating fatalities is obvious. But a recent study by the Corps of Engineers illustrates just how effective it can be, Jones said.
In a three-year study involving three lakes the Corps controlled in Mississippi, the federal agency imposed a rule requiring mandatory PFD wear by all boaters, adults as well as children. Signs announcing the rule were placed at all access points. Research showed 90 percent of boaters complied with the rule.
“The number of fatal boating-related incidents on those lakes fell to zero,” Jones said.
PFD use by adult boaters in Texas has been hard to estimate. But one admittedly limited study where trained observers tallied the percentages of boaters wearing PFDs while their boat was underway found only 1.9 percent of adults in powerboats wore PFDs while the boat was underway. The same study — part of a multi-year, nationwide research project — found about half of Texas teenagers (13-17) and a heartening 98 percent of boaters younger than 13 wore PFDs while boats were underway.
While the Texas numbers of PFD use by teens and younger children tracked closely to national figures, the use of PFDs by boating adults in Texas was less than a third the national average of 6.3 percent.
July marks the peak of Texas’ “high-use” boating season, a season that continues into September.
And while Texas is on a track to perhaps set record for the lowest number of boating-related fatalities, boating safety officials caution boaters to continually focus on safety when they are on the water.
“There’s a lot of summer left,” Jones said.
His advice for boaters: keep a close watch for summer thunderstorms, which can pop up quickly and create dangerous boating conditions; employ the boat’s engine’s cutoff switch (kill switch) that stops a boat’s motor when the operator is thrown from the helm; avoid alcohol if you are a boat operator or even a passenger; keep a close eye on other boaters, particularly in crowded waterways such as rivers or some of the most popular reaches of reservoirs; follow basic boating rules and regulations.
And wear a PFD. “There’s a reason they’re called ‘life jackets.’ ”