BRACK: Teach your children to swim

By Andy Brack, editor and publisher  |  While the world marveled at the miraculous rescue of 12 Thai boys and their coach, the drowning deaths of three South Carolinians years ago haunted my thoughts.

In June 1989, three girls and a boy played in the Edisto River in Charleston County about four miles upstream of U.S. Highway 17.  It was hot.  Suddenly, three girls, all cousins, got pulled into a swift undercurrent where the 3-foot-deep water sharply dropped.  One of the girls’ father jumped in to try to save them. Two other men pulled an 11-year-old girl from the river.  The 13-year-old boy got out on his own.

But the father went down trying to rescue his 15-year-old daughter and 12-year-old niece, as related in a story in The Post and Courier:

“When [the father’s] body was found on the river bottom about 5 p.m., [his niece’s] arms were around his neck.  [His daughter] was holding his arm, the deputy coroner said. ‘He made a heroic effort, but unfortunately, he wasn’t successful.’’”

Three members of a family – gone in an instant because they couldn’t swim out of a tough undercurrent.  It is one of the saddest stories I’ve ever written.  I think about it just about every time I cross the Edisto River.

In America, about 10 people die in unintentional, non-boating-related drownings every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The sad fact is that lots of kids – and adults – don’t know how to swim.  With as much water as we have in South Carolina at beaches and lakes and in  rivers and pools, it’s vital to have local efforts that push safety to prevent drowning deaths.  Not only can there be swimming lessons, but they can boost safety by offering “drownproofing” water safety programs that teach people how to float, not sink, in the water.

Colleton County, which currently has no public pools, is taking steps to offer a place for drownproofing classes.

Help is on the way thanks to the inspirational story of Anthony Rhone, a self-described former Walterboro drug dealer who says he’s trying to rebuild part of the community he helped destroy in the 1980s.

More than a year ago, Rhone created a nonprofit organization, Village Investment Project, to promote water safety.  At first, he wanted to buy a portable pool to cart around the county to provide drownproofing training.  But with government regulations and whatnot, he started lobbying the county’s Parks and Recreation Department to furnish the pool.

“He is extremely outgoing and extremely persistent,” observed Chris Myers, the county’s parks director.

Rhone explains he got involved in the pool project because he sees it as a way he can make a real difference.

“I see these kids as me,” he said.  “I wish I had had somebody there for me to do some of these things for me when I was a child.”

Back in 1976 when he was 5 , Rhone almost drowned in a pool at a Walterboro hotel where some family members were staying.  Kids splashed and rollicked.  Rhone remembers slipping into the shallow end to join them and edging toward the deep end.  But he let go of the side, almost instantly sinking like a rock.

“All of a sudden, I heard this splash and felt these arms grab me,” Rhone recalled.  “Mom’s boyfriend had heard the kids in the pool.  He found me at the bottom of the pool and gave me CPR and brought me back.”

Rhone, now a certified swimming instructor, said it’s important for black children to learn to swim.

“As an African-American male, I know most black people — old and young — can’t swim.  It was never taught to their ancestors.  They feared the water but also had a reverence for  it.  We were never taught to use it or play in it … and it’s a joke to us.  We’re only laughing because it’s so damned serious, but it’s sad.”

By next year, Colleton County expects to have a portable pool that can be used for drownproofing lessons, perhaps in coordination with the local school system, Myers said.

That’s what needs to happen all over.  We don’t need more kids to drown when it’s not tough to teach them how to be safe in the water.

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