The popular Sussex beach where five men drowned last week has been prioritised for inclusion in a national strategy aimed at making “high-risk” stretches of UK coastline safer.
As the inquest continues into the cause of the deaths on Camber Sands last week, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) told the Observer it had already held talks with local councillors, businesses and police.
As a result, Camber Sands is now to be included in its “community life-saving plan”, a national programme the service is rolling out to improve safety along the most hazardous stretches of UK coastline.
Five Sri Lankans in their teens and 20s drowned during a day trip from London to Camber Sands last Wednesday. A few weeks earlier, a 19-year-old Brazilian, Gustavo Silva Da Cruz, died swimming in the same stretch of sea, prompting Sri Lankan relatives of the latest tragedy to criticise the lack of safety measures on the stretch of Sussex coastline.
A temporary RNLI lifeguard service was introduced to the beach for the remainder of the summer, but a longer-term solution is already being prepared for what was, until recently, classified as a “benign” stretch of coast.
So far, the RNLI has identified 227 locations where its community lifesaving plan will be introduced. Volunteer safety officers will be recruited to organise community involvement and education. This year the organisation also introduced a drowning prevention strategy for Britain, a 10-year blueprint running from 2016 to 2026. The strategy identified men as most at risk of drowning, accounting for eight in 10 of all the deaths. Fatalities rise markedly for males aged in their mid-to-late teens, peaking among the 20 to 29-year-old age group. The RNLI hopes to halve the number of drowning fatalities in the sea – over the past five years, close to 200 a year have been killed. The service recorded 15,000 incidents on beaches last year, with 18,000 people needing to be rescued.
Brian Robson, community safety manager for the RNLI, said that Camber Sands, which can attract crowds of 25,000 to its seven-mile stretch of sands and dunes, was now among locations it had evaluated as high-risk.
He said: “Camber Sands has been fairly unique for us; obviously it came upon our horizon because of the previous fatality. Some colleagues who work along the south coast were talking to the council about whether we are doing enough, is everything in the right place?
“The horrible circumstances of last week has raised it on our risk scale. Until now, Camber Sands has been fairly benign, not a difficult area for us to work, but now it has been placed in a much higher-risk category.”
The other locations where community life-saving plans have been introduced include Three Cliffs Bay on the Gower peninsula, one of south Wales’ most popular beaches. Following the drowning of two people last year, the RNLI launched a programme working with local businesses, landowners and the National Trust. Lifeguards are now introduced during busy periods and new high-profile safety signs warn of dangerous current and rip tides in the area.
In the north Yorkshire resort of Scarborough, funds raised by the community, following the drowning last year of Andrew McGeown, 32, have seen the introduction of an initiative to teach local youngsters the perils of swimming offshore. This summer 400 local schoolchildren from the resort were educated on the dangers of swimming in open water compared with in a pool.
The RNLI is also studying the possibility of deploying drones that can carry an inflatable life ring to a swimmer in distress. Designers in the US have tested rings that automatically inflate as soon as they hit the water, helping swimmers to stay afloat until rescuers arrive.
One complicating factor is the constantly evolving nature of the UK coastline, with stretches becoming less or more dangerous. “The coastline around the UK is continually changing. One location might be high risk one year but not the next; the sea is dangerously unpredictable. We don’t know where the next event will strike, or what will happen this weekend,” said Robson.
He said another complicating issue was that one in 10 drownings involved individuals who had not meant to be in the water in the first place, such as a hiker who may have fallen into the sea.
