A renewed focus has been put on the hazard of rip currents following the death of a brother and sister while swimming off a beach in Ballybunion, north Kerry on Thursday evening,
Acting chief executive of Water Safety Ireland Roger Sweeney said people often are confused between different types of currents.
“An undercurrent could pull you under the surface, they run along the ocean floor, but the rip current runs along the surface,” he said.
“Say somebody arrives to a beach and they look down the beach and they see these small breaking waves running the length of the beach, so when they see those sometimes there’s an area that doesn’t have breaking waves; it might look a little choppier, sometimes no breaking waves.
“And where [the water] goes, it has to find a way to get back out, so what it does is it finds an area where the sand or the sandbank isn’t as elevated, so that’s the channel then that the water can go back out to sea. And that’s the current we’re talking about,” he said.
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Mr Sweeney added that the rip current usually attracts swimmers: “It can look a little choppy, it can look like it’s a little bit messy, but it doesn’t have the same number of waves, so a lot of people instinctively say, ‘oh yes, I must swim there now’.”
Water finds the route with the least resistance from the beach back out to sea, typically a narrow channel that can move along the beach, “so sometimes lifeguards move the flags up and down the beach because the rip current can change location”, said Mr Sweeney.
“This is something that’s silent, and it’s not easily seen, but a lot of people talking about jellyfish — there’s a point in that — but really, this is the reason for more incidents on or around the country than anything else, the rip currents.”
Mr Sweeney also urged people not to go into the water if they see someone struggling, and to instead “shout, reach and throw”.
Often a shout is all it takes to orientate a struggling swimmer towards the shore, said Mr Sweeney.
“Then reach for something, I remember talking to a nine-year-old girl who saved her 10-year-old brother from drowning using a hurley stick. I could say reach for a stick or reach for your jeans or whatever, anything that floats. The third one then is throw; and that’s the ring buoys that you see. So it’s just throw something [to them] that floats,” he said.