Almost a year after seven men drowned off Camber Sands beach, lifeguards will be stationed there for the summer for the first time.
But the local council’s decision has prompted the family of one victim to question why there was no lifeguard in place last year. “Perhaps our brother and his friends would still be with us if there had been lifeguards on the beach that day,” said the brother-in-law of one victim, who asked not to be named. “Too many people have drowned there.”
The popular beach, near Rye, east Sussex, which attracts up to 25,000 visitors a day in good weather and more than a million a year in total, had no lifeguards in place despite a 2013 Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) recommendation that they be introduced. Despite the deaths of two men last July no lifeguard had been introduced before an incident in August in which five more men were killed.
Now four lifeguards have been provided by the RNLI at a cost to the council, which holds responsibility for keeping the beach safe, of £51,000. They will patrol the beach from 27 May until 1 October. They are now in their final two weeks of training and are familiarising themselves with conditions on the beach.
Ahead of an inquest into the deaths next month, the brother-in-law of one of the five men who drowned last August said his family hoped the tragedies would never be repeated. “We lost our brother at Camber Sands last August along with his four friends,” he said. “They were on a day out. The weather was calm. They were good boys who could swim and they weren’t drinking or behaving badly. But they got caught out on a sandbar and all of them drowned. We are still devastated and we don’t want to see this happen to any other family.”
The RNLI said the move was an important change. “There is quite an expansive tide on this beach,” said Peter Dawes, the RNLI’s lifesaving services manager. “It’s a positive step that the council is providing an additional level of safety this summer by having lifeguards patrolling the beach. I think this measure will provide reassurance to the public. We will be providing lots of safety information to prevent problems arising in the water. We see rescue as an absolute last resort.”
On Tuesday the lifeguards demonstrated a variety of equipment including rescue boards, inshore rescue watercraft and vehicles.
Council officials said the beach, which is three miles long and up to 700 metres wide at low tide, could never be completely risk free, but they were determined to boost safety.
The five men who drowned in August 2016 were Kenugen Saththiyanathan, 18, known as Ken; his brother Kobikanthan Saththiyanathan, 22, known as Kobi; Nitharsan Ravi, 22; Inthushan Sriskantharasa, 23, and Gurushanth Srithavarajah, 27. The month before, Mohit Dupar, 36, died after trying to reach a Brazilian man, Gustavo Silva da Cruz, 19, after he got into difficulty.
The inquest into their deaths will begin on 26 June. Patrick Roche, the barrister for the relatives of the swimmers who lost their lives last year, said: “The hearing should look at whether Rother district council ‘could or should’ have done more to protect the lives of bathers at Camber Sands.”
Speaking after the decision to employ lifeguards this summer, the Rother district councillor Sally-Ann Hart said the council needed to act after the “significant and unprecedented” deaths.
Of the seven men who died one was of Asian heritage, one a Brazilian teenager and five of Tamil origin. The Guardian revealed that an incident log filed by a Rother district council official after the first two men drowned warned that the fact that the beach attracted “predominantly non-British visitors has been an increasing issue”. He blamed the drownings over the summer on the limitations of “non-swimming persons of a certain culture.”
All the men were described by family members as capable swimmers.
