ReportWire

Tag: public pools

  • Go to a Pool

    Go to a Pool

    [ad_1]

    In this summer of heat domes and record-breaking global temperatures, finding a place to cool off is more important than ever. You can go to a movie or a museum—if you want to buy a ticket. You can head to an air-conditioned bar—if you don’t have kids who also need to escape the heat. Or you can just stay at home and blast your own air conditioner—a rather lonely prospect, if you ask me.

    But there’s a better way to cool down, no air-conditioning or entrance fee required: America’s hundreds of thousands of public pools. Cool water, fresh air, exercise, babies, teenagers, seniors: They’re all at the pool. In a time of increasing heat and social isolation, public pools are a blessing.

    Where I live, in Manhattan, we have several outdoor pools smack in the middle of the sultry cement jungle. For that, my neighbors and I can thank, among others, Robert Moses, the urban planner who was instrumental in creating New York City’s public pools. Moses was a staunch advocate for public swimming. “It is no exaggeration to say that the health, happiness, efficiency, and orderliness of a large number of the city’s residents, especially in the summer months, are tremendously affected by the presence or absence of adequate bathing facilities,” he wrote in 1934.

    Swimming does, in fact, have important benefits for physical and mental health. Perhaps most crucial this summer: Immersing yourself in cold water can quickly lower your body temperature on a hot day. Swimming is fantastic aerobic exercise, and it’s easier on the joints than many other activities that raise your heart rate. Aerobic activity reduces stress, and swimming in particular has been shown to improve mood. In one preliminary study, swimming in the cold ocean reduced feelings of depression up to 10 times as much as watching from the beach did. In a separate case study, a woman with treatment-resistant depression experienced a significant improvement in her symptoms after swimming in open water once a week.

    I’ve loved swimming since I was a young child, when my father taught me, and even now, whenever I’m in a bad mood, I reflexively take myself to the water. I’ve always thought the mood-boosting effects of swimming were solely the product of the exercise and the resulting flood of endorphins in my brain—that I might get the same effect from, say, a hard weight-lifting session or a long run. But the thing is, the studies that find that swimming lifts your mood tend to involve swimming with other people. Perhaps the social contact is part of the magic too.

    Read: Who should public swimming pools serve?

    Early in the pandemic, when life ground to a halt, the indoor pool where I swim in the offseason had very strict rules. You had to reserve a time, and there were never more than two people in a lane. It should have been a swimmer’s dream: no crowd and a guaranteed lane. I swam just as hard and for just as long as usual. But to my surprise, the experience was devoid of pleasure.

    I didn’t understand why until one hot evening this summer, when I returned to Hamilton Fish, my favorite public pool in New York. It’s a sprawling, irresistible pool, flanked by trees, beautiful early-20th-century pavilions, and a plaza where people lounge about. When pools reopened during the first year of the pandemic, the city initially suspended adult hours at its outdoor pools in favor of free—and riotous—swim. When I visited, kids were shrieking with glee, horsing around and splashing everyone in sight. A handful of serious swimmers were trying in vain to find a lane for a workout, but I mainly paddled around with the kids, enjoying the cool water.

    After I did manage to find a lane to do laps, a group of kids approached me and asked if I would teach them how to do a flip turn. We had a blast practicing somersaults in the water. At closing time, after the lifeguards drove the reluctant throng out of the pool, I stood under the cold outdoor shower with the other swimmers, struck by the strange intimacy of it all: Here we were, complete strangers, a diverse collection of humanity, practically naked and standing around having fun together. Everyone got along.

    That is the whole, beautiful point of a public pool: to exercise and cool off with loads of people around. In the Southwest, where temperatures have been climbing above 100 for weeks, these facilities are a lifeline. Everywhere else, they can make the difference between a lonely, uncomfortable summer day and a joyful one. And yet, thanks to budget cuts and lifeguard shortages, fewer and fewer Americans have easy access to a municipal pool these days.

    Read: How lifeguards lost their luster

    Back in 1934, when Moses extolled the virtues of public pools, the United States was in a pool-building frenzy. Many of those pools were racially segregated, so not everyone could swim together, but in time they came to be melting pots, even as cities invested less in their upkeep and many white residents flocked to private facilities.

    Now, as the heat builds in American cities, Moses’s ideas about the role of community swimming in public health and happiness are more relevant than ever. If you can get to a public pool this summer—even if you could also use a backyard pool—make sure you take the plunge. Sure, it will still be blazing hot outside when you’re done, but the refreshment and relaxation will linger long after you’ve dried off.

    [ad_2]

    Richard A. Friedman

    Source link

  • The Lifeguard Shortage Never Ends

    The Lifeguard Shortage Never Ends

    [ad_1]

    The United States, you may have heard, is in a lifeguard shortage. The city of Houston is offering new lifeguards a $500 bonus. Jackson, Mississippi, is raising lifeguard pay by more than 40 percent. Colorado is “stepping up” with $250,000 for hiring lifeguard reinforcements; in the meantime, senior citizens are filling in. According to the American Lifeguard Association, about half of the nation’s public pools will have to close or reduce their hours this summer because of a lack of staff.

    The current shortage can be largely blamed on pandemic-era closures and work restrictions, according to news reports. But if that accounts for this year’s shortage as well as those reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022, it cannot explain the national lifeguard shortages of 2018, 2016, or 2012. Or, for that matter, a reported lifeguard shortage in 1984. Or 1951. Or 1926.

    These crises—and the newspaper stories that describe them—are as much a summer tradition as boardwalks and ice cream. Local or national news articles on the subject have appeared in May or June of every single year of the 21st century. Hundreds more specimens of this perennial have been published since the 1930s. Each lays out the same basic claims: The swimming season might be compromised; drownings could increase. But few acknowledge that such claims were also made the year before, and in all the years before that. Indeed, the specter of a long, unguarded summer has haunted us for five generations now, about as long as there have been formally trained lifeguards in America.

    The reasons given for the shortages have varied with the times. Now, of course, we have COVID. In the 1980s, authorities blamed Gen X demographics: “It’s happening because there simply aren’t as many 16-year-olds,” one told The New York Times. In the 1950s, they blamed the IRS: “Many lifeguards quit before earning $600 so their fathers can claim them as income tax dependents,” explained the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In the 1940s, experts said that the draft had roped in so many of the nation’s young men that, per The Baltimore Sun, some beaches and pools were “seriously considering employing women.” And in the 1930s, the shortage was attributed to the absorption of potential lifeguards into the Works Progress Administration.

    But overall, the purported causes of shortages are remarkably repetitive and, in many cases, remarkably ahistoric.

    The stringent requirements of lifeguarding—taking and paying for a multiday course to pass a tough physical exam—are a recurring scapegoat. So is low pay. In 1941, pool managers complained that young men who hadn’t been drafted could make much more working in defense industries than as a lifeguard. In 2007, a New Jersey lifeguard captain lamented to the Times that “iPods and cellphones are expensive … If kids are looking for the highest-paying job, it isn’t likely to be lifeguarding.” In that same article, a Connecticut parks official blamed the growing emphasis on career-building (and the concurrent rise of internships). The YMCA’s water-safety specialist also cited internships, in 2021. Any time unemployment is low, someone accuses it of contributing to the lifeguard shortage.

    By far the most consistent explanations over the years can best be described as “kids these days.” See 1987: “The kids around here have too much money.” And 2015: “There is another big turnoff: having a phone on the lifeguard stand is a firing offense.” And 2019: “Some [teens] are even frightened of the lifesaving responsibility the job carries.” And 2022: “People just don’t want to do this kind of job.” And 2023: “Since COVID, people don’t want to work.” Wyatt Werneth, the national spokesperson for the American Lifeguard Association, told me this week that, after the pandemic arrived, people who might otherwise be lifeguard candidates began opting for jobs that could be done at home, such as “the influencing and social media and stuff like that.”

    And then, of course, there’s the biggest problem of all: No one looks up to lifeguards anymore. From The New York Times in 1984: “Lifeguards were once authority figures, just like teachers once were. But the glory of the authoritarian age is gone.” In 1985, the Times wistfully recalled the lifeguard-loving cinema of the ’50s and ’60s (Beach Blanket Bingo and its ilk) and the reverence it once inspired. Robert A. Kerwin, the water-safety coordinator of the New Jersey State Division of Parks and Forestry, told the paper, “The day of the macho lifeguard sitting in the chair flexing his muscles is finished. For one thing, 25 percent of our guards are girls.” (For what it’s worth, Newspapers.com lists plenty of articles about lifeguard shortages from the ’50s and the ’60s too.)

    Read: Imagining the jellyfish apocalypse

    The Times once declared, “The lifeguard is an endangered species.” But its population recovered briefly in the 1990s, thanks to David Hasselhoff. “When I became a lifeguard,” Werneth said, “we had Baywatch, and everybody wanted to be a lifeguard. They wanted that lifestyle where you had helicopters and you had fast boats and beautiful people, and you’re saving lives.” But Baywatch: Hawaii ceased production in 2001, and after that, Werneth told me, “things started declining.” Lifeguard employment took a dip and then a swan dive starting in 2020. “I can almost call it a ground zero,” Bernard Fisher, the director of the American Lifeguard Association, said of the shortage in a 2022 Fox News article.

    Despite the tenor of that analogy (Fisher also compared the lack of lifeguards to the lack of baby formula), drowning rates haven’t really spiked. In fact, they’re now a third of what they were in 1970, and have been dropping steadily for a century or more. (There was a very slight uptick in 2020 and 2021, the most recent years for which data are available.) In other words, the many lifeguard crises of the past—or perhaps the single, never-ending one—have not correlated with any widespread drowning crises in America. That does not mean that lifeguard shortages are fake, but hard data on their scope remain obscure. Werneth told me that the American Lifeguard Association receives “very sporadic” reports from pools, parks, and beaches, and has just a rough sense of the level of need in different regions.

    But if the lifeguard is once again an endangered species, it’s still beloved: more like a giant panda than a Gerlach’s cockroach. As a culture, we do still think of lifeguards as sexy, heroic, and essential (if not authoritarian). Baywatch may be off the air, but it’s always coming back.

    [ad_2]

    Rachel Gutman-Wei

    Source link