Come home from work and there thousand people on the south wall, cops, few boats, ambos, 4 choppers but no one knows why..
Green dye in the water though. Maybe shark (prob not) maybe drowning?
Apparently a 12yo kid is missing.. no sign of him after at least 40 minutes. Beach is fairly calm and the current doesnt look too bad on the surface so who knows
Its a beach that needs respect. The currents and rips are far worse then they get credit for.
It was a African youth from the looks on the face i saw this morning on my morning run..
Ive lived there for over 20 years and have rescued myself three but have seen about 30 rescued by others. I surfed there Sat arvo and the rip was nasty.
It was just Sat that i was saying how much i love my local. Today i'm slightly disappointed in her..(The beach that is)
R.I.P
My heart goes out to his family, from the sound of it they came to Australia in search of new life for there kids, and life does this to them. What a shame!
RIP to the young bloke :( They found his body today. Such a sad and avoidable situation.
Just a few hundred metres north of the marina you have a perfect patrolled beach
Signs are not the problem and will never fix the problem. It's the parents responsibility in this case, he was a child with limited marine knowledge. With saying that I do still feel compassion for all of his family.
Poor bugger. R.I.P little man.
Even a national govt advertising campaign asking the public if they know how to swim (or float) most Aussies take it for granted that water and the ocean r just plain part of our culture and learning to swim is as important to us as learning to read. This country was and is built by and full of immigrants (no disrespect to our indigenous folk) there must be a big contingent of these who can't swim.
RIP little man.
It is terrible what happened and I do feel for the family - big time.
I can't imagine losing a child by any means, at any age. I know what u mean Rod.
Now talking about education though- my kid is 7.5 and is doing school swimming, now in stage 5, and knows about rips.
I can understand the overseas people straight off the plane on Bondi rescue (they should call it Shanghai rescue 
) but not a kid who has been here a while.
So maybe better signage ?? Cos we take it for granted that a 12 y/o knows and his parents know - but obviously not. Which is very sad indeed...
Some of us seem to have forgotten their childhood.
A sign saying no = yes.
A sign saying do not enter = welcome mat.
A sign saying swim between the flags = swim 100mt to the side.
We as adults still continue to ignore 90% of signs unless they cost us money.
I and many would agree education is the first defense.
I reckon 'Nippers' is a great program and my wife & I have made it compulsory for our kids for at least the first few years. Our 9 & 7yo already know about rips, currents & although a couple of times I've stood on the beach nervous about how far they are swimming out in some pretty ordinary conditions (during mock rescues & basic ocean appreciation), I know that they are in good hands with the SLSC.
Swimming is a great start, but as a friend of ours (from 'the city') mentioned a few weeks back when his 11yo daughter went for her first swim in the ocean - "swimming in a pool doesn't teach you how to appreciate the power of the ocean." His daughter regularly swims 'laps', but when she got knocked off her feet in a small shore-break she had no idea what hit her & began to panic.
It sounds treacherous. I had a bit of an experience at Alex in Qld a few weeks back, got caught out in a current & pushed on to some rocks...very scary & lucky only to cop a bit of bark off the legs, although I blamed stupidity on my part.
^^^^^^So there were signs saying its not a patrolled beach and how to swim out of a rip. But they still chose to swim there? Goes back to Youngbull's comment last night. At face value it seems to be a combination of a weak swimmer, ignorance and a lack of supervision.
Trying not to bump the thread - I'll do my best.
We spend millions on surveillance in airports, shops, home, ect ect. Technology allows us facial recognition, thermal imaging, night vision, soon how bad our breath is. We place helicopters to catch a hoon - when cops could just wait and get them later. We are contemplating drones.
Why are our beaches (known hotspots) not fitted with any of this equipment, the darn computers do all the hard work and notify where the trouble is.
I know why its because our government gets nothing to save a life
- put someone in prison and a shiz load of people get a shiz load of money.
Australia is so focused on money everything else is now second.
Just a few strategically placed camera's would eliminate so many deaths on our beaches but we all know this will never happen
. 1 camera on a good system could scan 2km's of beach in seconds.
Bloods starting to boil - time to stop typing.
Even if a system was developed you have two big hurdles, firstly the logistics of covering 100km of Perth metro coast, secondly computers can't swim, the response time for someone to respond to an emergency relying on monitoring equipment will most likely exceed the survivability of a weak swimmer in a rip.
Yes there are some known hotspots, but rips by nature can be very transient and short-lived. Monitoring them all is an impossible challenge, that is why we are always encouraged to swim between the flags.
Swimming outside the flags is a personal choice and we shoulder our own consequences if we do so. It's a shame the young fella drowned but for what ever reason he chose to swim there. The only thing that would make this a genuine tragedy is if he couldn't read English and had no beach knowledge.
Hi Chris - Not digging
100km, 50 camera's - 1 computer.
Say 1 camera 10k
1 computer 500k
Installation say 3mil.
At a guess 10mil all up plus maintenance including install.
I live at cruddy old Strathpine in Brisbane. Apparently we need 1 overpass which has been going on for a year down the road. It's a small bridge. Cost 12+ mil as stated on a sign.
12mil for 1 bridge or 10mil to save even 1 life. ???
^^^ yeah but as Chris says - who will respond?
On-the-ball camera operator sees person in trouble within 60 sec.
He calls the nearest rescue peeps, lets say 500m away cos this is an ideal world.
They jump on a quad and race there.
The person has now been underwater for 60sec plus. He is dead.
Now lets add in realism - camera operator has 10hrs shift fatigue, the phone is busy, the quad takes 10sec to start and some idiot waves them down for a chat on the way, and they are 2km away. It is easily a 10min response time.
We have the best system possoble, which is monitored sections of beach where there are real people watching a short section of beach.
If people choose not to use that ... well.....
The sad part is they didn't know any better .... so we need to address why. Cos any kid passing away is a great tragedy
There is also a big problem with cameras that no-one has brought up yet.
While I worked at the big tall pub at Scarborough, we had a continual hassle with our security cameras.
Humidity and the daily seabreeze would fog up the camera lenses and render them useless.
Often they needed cleaning several times a day, even with special anti-fog treatment on the lenses or boxes they were mounted in didnt help much.
What has happenned is tragic, and is not a new phenomenon.
My father was a long time member of City Beach Surf Club- back in the 50's and 60's they were continually dragging out waterlogged "New Aussies" who didnt know any better- or believed they were bulletproof (as well as locals).
We continually hear media reports of tourists, newbies and dopy locals being fished out- dead and sometimes alive, all around the country.
Until migrants learn to read and understand English- and are educated about the risks of outdoors Australia before being let loose, and locals learn to be responsible for themselves, tragic losses like these will continue.
Unless of course- we ban beaches and have them all locked away as they are obviously too dangerous for the public to be trusted with.
(tongue firmly in cheek for the last bit)
stephen.
Not taken as a criticism Youngbull, so it's all good.
You are effectively asking each camera to cover 3km each (allowing for an overlap and built in redundancy). That's a zoom of 1500 metres, the camera would have such a narrow field of view and poor resolution at maximum range it would be totally ineffective. Plus you would also need an office full of staff watching 100 monitors and constantly panning them.
Probably double the number of cameras that you suggest, plus each camera would cost way more than $10k, especially if they are not parked right next to mains power and phone/data connection. To install a camera that is vandal proof, theft proof, most likely solar powered, optically useful, marine/salt resistant, and wifi connected to a line of site server you are all of a sudden talking about $50 to $100k per camera, plus the remote servers and monitoring centre you are now talking not much change out of $30 or $40 million. Plus maybe 50 staff (once you add in support staff, camera staff, management, techies, cleaners etc etc) you are talking $5 million a year in running costs.
Then you have to talk about emergency response staff... To provide a timely response you would need two staff at every camera site. All of a sudden annual costs have gone through the roof.
The alternative is as Mark has suggested and we already have in place, small, safe sections of beach at regular intervals along the coast, staffed and patrolled by volunteers with red and yellow flags to say, "here is a safe place to swim ". And I guarantee they have a better response than any government run service because they are already there and concentrating their efforts into a small manageable area, plus they are on the beach already and probably do more for prevention than any other option. Cost per year? volunteers, so almost nothing, capital contributions by local government for club rooms, corporate funding plus operating costs for consumables like uniforms and fuel.
Probably the biggest issue to address with this drowning is whether there were any issues with education and whether the young fella has been in Australia long enough to be exposed to any education on beach hazards and whether his English is adequate. Media is reporting him as a 14 year old African boy, first question I have is how long has he been in Oz.
Cheers Chris, you put things into perspective more than me. + more knowledge and more of a breakdown.
