The police have arrested four people, including guards, for negligence
Summer is here and the city's swimming pools are sure to be full up. That is why warning bells must toll, reading reports like the one in this newspaper that detailed how a nine-year-old boy drowned in the Vasai Virar City Municipal Corporation's swimming pool over the weekend.
The police have arrested four people, including guards, for negligence. The report says that a group of children had gone swimming. While their parents had accompanied them to the venue, they were not in the pool with the kids. At the end of two hours, the children rejoined their parents but one boy didn't. It was only after a frantic search that his body was found at the bottom of the adults' pool.
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Children have to be supervised by lifeguards and ideally, a parent should be sitting by the pool. This boy should have had a float or swimming aid on himself. If children are not confident, they have to swim in the children's pool where the water is shallow. It is inexplicable why this boy was in the adults' pool.
Every facility has to have lifeguards and the guards themselves have to be monitored on CCTV. They are at no point in time, supposed to wander off from the poolside for whatever reason.
There needs to be at least four lifeguards at a complex given the summer rush. All swimming aids like floats have to be neatly stacked and accessible to all swimmers. Parents must ensure that children also have their own float device and carry them to the pool.
The municipal authorities need to have surprise checks on guards and ensure all safety measures are in place at their facilities. Private pools, and this goes for buildings that have swimming pools, cannot be exempt and need internal checks at their complexes, too.
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