MILOWOKY – In the first week of June in Wisconsin, beachgoers on the neat shores of Lake Michigan walked along volleyball nets on rainbow bars and a beachfront cafe offering bratwurst, quesadilla, and mojitos.
Only one thing was missing. Instead of the traditional wooden life racks, there was a cherry red lifeguard and a sign: “There is no lifeguard on duty. Swim at your own risk. ”
Lifeguards are frustratingly scarce this year, leaving tens of thousands of pools in the country closed and beaches unguarded, and the public distancing itself from the stubbornness of American summer.
In Milwaukee County, where temperatures have already reached the 1980s and students have completed the school year, a network of public swimming pools is closed rather than open. At least five facilities have been closed and four pools will be open to the public, officials said. On the popular beaches of Lake Michigan, swimmers have to navigate the crashing waves and dangerous waves themselves.
Recruitment problems spread across the country: officials in Austin, Texas, said they had not yet found willing rescuers for half of the 750 positions they hoped to occupy. In Cincinnati, rents fell so short that only eight of the city’s 23 pools could open.
“I feel like an unsolvable problem,” said Jim Tarantino, deputy director of parks in Milwaukee County, which manages the city’s swimming pools. “We are as devastated as the community.”
City officials and industry experts point to the crushing of factors leading to a shortage of lifeguards. The low unemployment rate has given young people many job opportunities. Due to Covid’s restrictions during the pandemic, swimming lessons and lifeguard courses have often been suspended for parts of the past two years, drilling holes in an already weak training pipeline. And employers choose from a smaller group of candidates: in states like Wisconsin, there are simply fewer teenagers than in decades past, as residents increasingly choose to have smaller families.
“This is the worst thing we’ve seen,” said Bernard J. Fisher II, director of health and safety at the American Rescue Association, added that a third of the country’s beaches and swimming pools are affected by the shortage.
Even for swimming pools that remain open, many are canceling swimming lessons and hiring their instructors to work as lifeguards, complicating the problem of future training. “If we don’t keep training new lifeguards all summer, it will be a long time before we get out of this,” Mr Fisher said.
Desperate for help, cities and private employers took up privileges and raised hourly wages. Six Flags St. Louis offered up to $ 18 an hour to rescuers and promised a $ 500 bonus. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Parks Department covered the cost of training lifeguards this year, helping to attract enough applicants to service their pools.
In New Orleans, known for its hot and humid summers, lifeguards earn $ 15.91 an hour, a jump of just under $ 12 an hour last year, said Larry Barabino Jr., chief executive of the New Recreation Development Commission. Orleans, the organization that manages city parks and pools.
“We’ve been on the news, on social media, on the radio,” Mr Barabino said.
But it didn’t work. Only five of the city’s 13 seasonal pools will open this summer. And Mr Barabino is worried that teenagers will have fewer opportunities to relax, especially when their families cannot afford expensive private camps and holidays.
“The challenge for some young people is whether they will be able to walk to the pool in their neighborhood?” He said. “And the answer is no. They will not have the ability to swim every day. “
Austin’s public swimming pool network is slowly coming back to life as staffing increases, and Aaron Levine, a water sports supervisor, says he hopes the department will do better than last year. But he worries that a shortage of national lifeguards will have consequences for the safety of swimmers, especially for children who do not have good water skills.
“It’s hard to watch,” he said. “It’s 100 degrees in Texas. If they do not come to their guarded neighborhood pool, they will find a body of water somewhere.
Many unused pools across the country are showing signs of deterioration, with weeds sprouting in cracks in the concrete. The Washington Park swimming pool in Milwaukee is one of them, its mint green diving boards overhanging an empty pool, and the low-barred building next door is locked and shuttered.
Mike Ittier, who lives a few blocks away, was sitting on his front porch last afternoon, complaining that the local pool – surrounded by a chain link fence east of the water – was inaccessible to children in the neighborhood.
He has lived in the city for decades and remembers his own days as a teenager in the 1970s: When he was 14, he got a job as a lifeguard in this very pool.
“It was beautiful then,” he said. “You rode your bike there, checked your bike – they watched it for you – and paid 25 cents to swim.”
A short drive to Lake Bradford Beach on Lake Michigan, where a sign warned visitors there would be no lifeguards on duty, some Milwaukee residents said the absence felt like a loss to a favorite ritual.
Tyesha Shareef, 29, was on the beach during a break from her real estate career, spending a quiet minute watching the water from her car. She has fond memories of coming to the beach as a child, she said when lifeguards were many and crowds larger.
“I remember it was so great then,” she said, adding that although her 2-year-old daughter could swim, she would not want to lead her to the water without a lifeguard, knowing how quickly a child can escape even the most -a very attentive parent.
“I just don’t think it’s safe,” Ms. Sharif said. “Is not the same.”
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