Peter's Waterways Blog Drownings This was first published in IWA West Riding's Milepost in September 2017, to highlight the extent of preventable drownings on our inland waterways.

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Tributes at 'Owen's Place'

"Four hundred people drown around the UK every year and a further 200 take their own lives on our waters. Many of these deaths are preventable and more can be done to reduce this loss of life." So says the National Water Safety Forum here. The picture is the local remembrance of just one of those deaths. In July, Owen Jenkins, 12 years old, died trying to rescue a girl from Beeston weir on the River Trent. See a news account here.

Waterways administrators and all of us as waterway users can assist in preventing some of those preventable deaths, and signs and equipment have a role to play. Here is a sign at Beeston, and below is a new sign and throwline in Leeds, recently installed as part of the Leeds Flood Alleviation Scheme. Your task (if you choose to accept it, as they say) is to write the risk assessment for the padlock part of the Leeds throwline scheme, and so recommend whether it is better with the padlock or without the padlock.

Sign on the sloping ground down to the weir on its downstream side. The purple ribbon is in memory of Owen.

Throwline and instructions on River Aire in Leeds

"Four hundred people drown around the UK every year and a further 200 take their own lives on our waters." Of those six hundred annual drownings, about ten will have been in West or South Yorkshire. Of the two hundred suicides by drowning, about half will have been in rivers or canals. Of the four hundred accidental drownings, about a third will have been in rivers or canals. Also of those four hundred, about one sixth will have been women.

Here, then, is a wholly imaginary scenario: you are in Leeds after a night out, it is dark and cold, you are alone except for a drunken male person who has failed to walk across the crest of the new weir and needs rescuing from the river. There are no moored boats around from whom you can borrow a pole or a life-ring, and you see the throwline notice for the first time, without having previously considered its use.

The new weir below Crown Point Bridge in Leeds

Sign on temporary works at Selby on tidal River Ouse

Has the sign's padlock deterred the local vandalry from stealing misusing or disabling the throwline? ... Have you a phone and is it charged? “Fire service please … ” Do they immediately understand your mission and the four-digit number they need to give you? Can you see the padlock's numbers in the dark? Can you see which line they need to line-up-to? Can you still remember the number to fiddle with the dials? Can you extract the throwline and deploy it before a fire-engine arrives? And has the drunken weir-walker been taken downriver with the current? Have you been able to watch his progress while fiddling with the padlock?

It's not the length of the list of risks which is important, it is the evaluation on objective evidence across all the reasonable scenarios, and coming to an overall judgement. Nor is there a 'right' answer.

River Aire in Leeds in flood

If you have accepted the challenge, and reached your own conclusion, then there are many similar challenges for our volunteers in writing risk assessments, which are needed for a good range of publicly-visible IWA activities. It's not just the canal-digging that we need: the brainwork, interviewing the experts, and presenting a well-thought case is an important element in getting-things-done. Over to you and the volunteers-needed advertisements. The pictured sign is intended to be humourous, and is on the outside of a pub by a popular narrow lock. It replaced an earlier sign with the same message. Enquiries at the bar elicited the response that there had been some equipment in the cellar, but it may no longer be there.

Update in Milepost in June 2018: Drowning. I looked up the statistics of avoidable deaths in our waterways, and worried about the arrangements for using the new lifelines around the Leeds Waterfront, which require a potential rescuer to have a mobile phone to hand, to phone the emergency services for a code with which to twiddle dials on a numeric padlock and then to follow instructions for the use of the line.

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I mentioned the tragic death of a young man at Beeston Weir near Nottingham who went into the water to help two children, both of whom survived. Local tributes continue to be maintained on a large fence, and a new lifeline has been installed by the weir, lower down on the sign pictured in the earlier article. Its access arrangements are similar to the ones in Leeds, except that the necessary code is for a push-button locking device. Peter Scott @peterjohnscott