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Dolphins

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For the past couple of years, the idea that we are communal animals has become more and more evident. The pandemic has really shown us how important it is for us to interact in groups. Even the most reclusive person needs that human contact that is such an important part of our essential being.

That cooperative spirit allows us to accomplish incredible things. We are most successful when we work together to accomplish goals. Often in this column we’ve looked at cooperative programs that relate to the beachfront where different people or groups have combined efforts and resources to create an outcome that is much greater than each individual part. Survivor Support Network, Wave Watchers, Galveston Marine Response, all the various groups that protect, clean, maintain, and provide services on the beachfront, are all examples of this concept.

To me, one thing that is especially awe inspiring is when we not only work together to help people, but when people work together to help our fellow animals. Not much demonstrates this concept better than the Marine Mammal Stranding Network.

This amazing group of mostly volunteers coordinates rescues of dolphins and whales along the Texas coast. We as lifeguards often have the privilege to work alongside our partners in the Coastal Zone Management department of the Park Board to help save stranded animals, and to manage the care of their bodies when they don’t survive a stranding.

The Marine Mammal Stranding Network is dedicated to the Conservation of Marine Mammals through Rescue and Rehabilitation, Research and Education. The Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network (TMMSN) provides a coordinated response to all marine mammal strandings along the Texas coastline.

Most of what we see in our area are bottle nosed dolphins swimming, playing, eating, and occasionally will wash up on the beach.  From time to time a tourist will mistake their dorsal fins for a shark’s and panic. Normally you don’t see shark fins from shore, but a shark has a triangular fin and dolphins have a curved fin that rakes back. Dolphins are incredibly intelligent with larger brains and more complicated language than we humans possess.  They are even more communal than we are and are usually in small groups called pods swimming so close together that they often graze each other. Using echolocation, they are so aware of each other in the water that they often coordinate their movement to the point where it seems they have one mind. Being air breathing mammals stranding themselves when sick, injured or dying is a way to avoid drowning.

They often come up to their human counterparts who are swimming, surfing, boating, or fishing. It’s a bit unnerving to be in the water and have something so large and powerful come up and stare at you out of an eye that radiates curiosity and intelligence. But I’ve never heard of them injuring a human and there are plenty of stories of them helping us. So maybe the wonderful work of the TMMSN is a small way of paying them back.

 

 

Please visit dolphinrescue.org/rescue for more information.

  • The first thing you can do to help a marine mammal in need of rescue is to call the TMMSN 24 hour hotline at 1-800-9MAMMAL (1-800-962-6625).
  • Dolphins and whales do not usually wash up on our beaches unless they are sick, injured, or orphaned, so it is important NOT to push them back into the water.

Coastal Zone Management

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The world is asleep. At 4am the sanitation truck pulls out of the Park Board Coastal Zone Department lot and hits the beachfront, working by headlights along an empty beach.

By the time the traffic starts getting heavy they’re usually gone. At 6 the beach crews head up to the beachfront to hand pick the trash off the beach. They are comprised of full-time staff members, but in the summer months they bring in 15-20 contract laborers a day to augment the normal crews and run two trash trucks. They also go from 5 eight hour shifts a week, to 4 six-hour shifts and two eight-hour shifts. Additionally in the summer they run an afternoon crew on the seawall that tips cans and cleans both sides of the street. Meanwhile the mechanics breathe life into the machines and other workers do projects at “the yard”, and the crew rallies for various special events on and off the beach throughout the year.  During the summer, there’s a night squad that runs the beaches picking up the abandoned canopies that tourists leave behind. The work never ends.

The past couple of years have brought new challenges because of the marked surge in beach use. Previously a trash truck was dumped out every 2-3 days. Now both trucks they run in summer are dumped daily. The sheer tonnage they pick up annually is mind boggling, and now its more than doubled.

These men and women work hard. By the time most of the world is prying the gook out of their eyes and getting that first cup of coffee, they’ve already gotten through half a workday. And they do it in crazy hot, cold, rainy, or sand-blasting windy weather.

Right now, they’re taking advantage of the “slow” time to fix bollards at the beach access points, rejuvenate the recycle bins and port-a-let enclosures, and straightening signage along the beach. They put up the holiday decorations downtown, worked the Dickens and Biker Rally events, and are doing all kinds of smaller projects.

I’ve had the privilege of working alongside a lot of the Coastal Zone Management Department crew for years, and they never cease to amaze me with the pride they take in the job and the amount of work they can muster when the need arises. They’ve had a good thing going there for decades and that translates into efficiency and hard work and clean beaches and money coming into our economy.

At the center of it all is Larry Jackson. Larry is a good manager, great person, and has an interesting past. He spent years making a living from fishing as a commercial fisherman, a guide, and as the host of a fishing show. He even used to have a giant tank that he’d bring around on a gooseneck trailer for special events, business openings, and fishing lessons.

We’re so lucky to have Larry and his incredible crew.  If you’re up early enough tell them how much their labor of love means to the island!

Bikes and Training

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Whether you’re hunkering down with the groceries you bought before the crowds descended or out in the mix reveling in one of the largest events of this type anywhere, its hard not to notice its Biker Rally Weekend. I personally am a fan despite the inconvenience when moving around. I grew up riding as a kid on motocross style bikes, and rediscovered road bikes later as an adult. And as a professional people watcher I love all the different subcultures of the biker world out there.  Plus, the biker rally crowd typically don’t spend a lot of time in the water or driving their expensive bikes on the sand itself. We assist EMS and Fire with medical calls and help GPD a bit with the crowds, but it’s not a 4th of July kind of thing.

This week we started reducing our beach coverage somewhat and diverted some of our staff each day to the big job of tower refurbishment and repair. Considering weather and training breaks, this is scheduled to be a two-month job. We’ll also be focusing some training time on our typical operational winter training which includes medical, law enforcement, boat operations, and SCUBA training.

This winter is unique in that we’re going to focus our energy not only on external operational skills, but also internal training. We’re a hybrid organization in so many ways. We’re a public safety group that specializes primarily in ocean rescue and medical response, but also do a fair amount of code enforcement through both our peace officers and non-sworn staff. Most importantly, we have a lot of seasonal workers that aren’t part of the traditional public safety culture, have employees with over 50 years difference in ages, and a good mix of gender and ethnicities. Its critical that all these people work in a supportive environment in relative harmony, so that we can put maximum effort into protecting swimmers and responding to emergencies. And we all need to be able to communicate in a way that is respectful and isn’t misinterpreted. So, we are integrating training in intercultural competency, alcohol awareness, and in a program we started last year targeting resiliency for first responders. We’re also stepping up the training we’ve traditionally provided in leadership, workplace harassment, and other areas, and have formed a diverse committee to monitor culture throughout the organization.

In our lifeguard academy we stress the importance of a strong body, mental preparation through a well-developed and practiced skill set, and strength of spirit. With the first two we’re pretty adept at teaching and enforcing the practice necessary. But, although we allude to the importance of a strong spirit, we didn’t really have the tools to teach it effectively. But this new training will help us teach our staff to better support and take care of themselves and each other, so we can better take care of the public.

And despite our differences, our staff is incredibly united in the desire to be the best we can be to keep people safe.

Visit Galveston

Cooling Down

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Traditionally, we always look at Halloween as the point where the water is too cold to see much activity. That has gone out the window with so much else, but it is a marker that things are starting to cool down. When the seasons change, it all happens pretty quickly in Galveston. Suddenly the beach water is in the low 70s instead of the 80’s, you’re working to stay warm instead of cool, and the days are much shorter.

We’ve still been busy, particularly on the weekends. Having our seasonal lifeguards, who work in the towers, gone had meant our Full-Time crew has had to step it up, which they’ve done. They’re having a competition to see who can put the most miles on their vehicles as they patrol. Without the towers, keeping moving is the name of the game so we can keep those swimmers out of the rip currents near the rocks.

As a lifeguard told me a while back, the end of the season is a kind of “bittersweet” feeling. After a long season of hard work, it’s a relief for them to get out of the “thunder dome”. But they instantly start missing the beach, the work, and the camaraderie. I remember how when I’d finish the season as a tower guard and go to school or wherever, I’d have a sort of let down that bordered on depression. The work was so intense and so fulfilling. It’s almost like I physically missed the adrenaline of working rescues and medical calls. I also missed all the physical activity and just being on the beach all day every day.

Our fulltime staff, in addition to patrolling daily, also continues to respond to 911 calls 24 hours a day throughout the winter.  In addition, we also start off season maintenance duties soon. In addition to replacing beach signs and repairing equipment, we’ll soon start the main task for winter, which is to rebuild and replace the 24 lifeguard towers we put out on the beach each season. Other duties include website redesign, water safety education outreach, policy and procedure manual update, maintenance of rescue boards and other equipment, ordering supplies etc. It goes fast and first thing we know we’re back out in force guarding for spring break.

One really nice thing about cooler weather and not having that heavy press of people on the beach, is that our team gets a chance to drop down to a 40-hour work week, and get some time with family, to train, catch up on their chores at home, or even go for a low stress surf session. I’m really happy for them to get some normal days with a normal stress level after one of the most difficult seasons that we’ve been through in recent history.

There are still plenty of beautiful days on the beach so hopefully you’ll find time to get out there to enjoy it in the way you love most. See you there!

Surf Roots

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At 10 my friend David Schutz and I bought surfboards. I think our moms were sick of us riding homemade skim boards in the ditch and both of us coming in for dinner covered in oozy abrasions. Mine was a smashed up 5’11” yellowed Dale Dobson and his was a 6’1” green Petrillo. Beautiful. It was 1975, short boards hadn’t been around long, and every board had one fin. We sucked. But man, we had fun! My mom took us up to the beach at 47th all the time, and we’d stand in waist deep water and push into waves thinking we were superstars.

In 6th grade I went to a new school and met surfers that lived near me. We’d ride bikes up to 53rd and surf together for fun and for protection from the older, better, meaner surfers. Our friend group grew and we got better. There weren’t a lot of surfers around then and we knew most everyone by sight if not personally.

Being the 70’s there was this sort of hippy vibe to the whole surf scene. Lots of the older, hardcore guys worked jobs that they could ditch when the fickle Texas surf came up. A bunch of them worked at the Glassing Factory or Freestyle Fins. Both of those places were pretty tolerant if you took off for a month or two to go down to Mexico or farther on safari. They also closed down on days with surf and they’d all hit the water. Some of the best local surfers worked there and it was pretty humbling if you were out in the lineup when they all paddled out together.

One day I drifted out too far with the rip into the lineup and got in one of the real superstar’s way. I dove under and heard the boards crack. “YOU STUPID KOOK!” he yelled balling up his fist. “I was here first!” I yelled/stammered, my little tween voice cracking. The older surfer looked like he was going to smash my face for a minute, and then seemed to think better of pummeling an 11-year-old. Instead, he paddled off, a deep gash on his leg trailing blood (which he ignored and kept surfing). He turned, glared, and yelled, “GET OUT OF THE WATER AND GO HOME GROM!”

Now, 47 years later, I’m intimately familiar with all the rules I broke. The person on the wave has the right of way. The person closest to the curl has the right of way. The first person to stand up has the right of way. Beginners (“groms”) should stay away from the pier, the rip current, and the pack at the end. And in every surfing pack there’s at least one “alpha”. That guy or girl gets their choice of waves and should be shown respect at all times.

Surfing culture has changed as the sport has grown and become more mainstream. Its more inclusive and less territorial. It may have lost some of its mystique, but the waves are the same.

Perfect Storm & Non Fatal Drowning

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Sergeant Andy Moffett and Supervisor Michael Lucero were powering up and down the seawall last Sunday moving swimmer after swimmer away from the rocks. The wind was howling, water was rough, there were strong lateral currents pulling people to the rocks, and the rip currents were really strong. On top of all that the beach was packed, the water and air were both in the ‘80’s, and only a handful of guards were able to come in to work.

They moved a woman away from the rocks on the west side of 17th street, explained the dangers, and raced to the next rock groin to make sure no one was getting too close since their last pass. They covered a zone that went from 37th to 10th street, but other trucks were working other zones along the beach doing the same thing. Even the 6 lifeguards in towers were busy just watching their one area.

A few minutes after they pulled away from 17th street, the 911 dispatcher came up on our radio reporting a call on a possible drowning. Moffett and Lucero raced back to 17th to find the same woman with bystanders having started CPR after finding her face down on the shoreline in shallow water on the opposite side of the rocks. They later learned from witnesses that she’d entered the water again a few minutes after they left outside of the “no swimming” area but was quickly swept to the rocks and got caught in the rip current. The rip currents caused a drop off so she couldn’t stand as the water pulled her away from shore. She struggled and went face down for a couple of minutes before the bystanders found her and pulled her up on the shore to begin CPR.

Moffett and Lucero arrived, ran to the crowd with their medical gear and quickly took over CPR. They got a heartbeat back with the help of the Galveston Fire Department. Police provided crowd control and got witness statements as she was moved up to the Seawall into a waiting ambulance.

By the end of the weekend, we moved about 2,500 people from the dangerous areas near the rocks and responded to quite a few emergency calls.

Monday was the last day for seasonal lifeguards. By the time you read this we will probably have all the towers off the beach for the rest of the year and will be working out of mobile patrol vehicles until next March. We still have quite a bit of warm weather ahead of us. Hopefully we won’t have another weekend like last one.

I am so proud of our staff for how they rise to the occasion when we have these “perfect storms” of warm water, crowds, and rough conditions. But we really hope that the people coming to the beach over the next few weeks realize that patrolling out of a vehicle is way less effective than having guards at each spot and take that personal responsibility to be safe upon themselves.

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October is the best month of the year in Galveston for the beach. If the weather was porridge in a Goldilocks story, we’d be the third bowl. Water is still nice and warm, but the air has cooled off just a bit, so you almost hate walking into a building and not spending every available minute outside. And, at least on the weekdays, the press of people has abated. So, when you go out to the beach you usually only share space with a handful of people.

Weekends will still be crowded for a couple of months, and our staff has been busy moving swimmers away from the deep holes and strong rip currents by the groins, making the occasional rescue, and have been getting quite a few after hours calls. Looking at crowd and climate trends we anticipate having some pretty decent weekend crowds to, and possibly into, December.

This is the last weekend for our seasonal lifeguards. We can only work them 7 months out of the year as “seasonal workers”. After this Sunday we’ll be covering the beach with mobile patrols each day. This means emergency response only on the west end, as we focus our efforts on the seawall areas with rock groins. From next Monday until the beach finally shuts down (aside from surfers, fishermen, and visiting Northern Europeans) we’ll be operating using just our year-round staff and will be able to run patrols of two or three trucks a day. These same staff members will rotate to cover “call”, meaning that someone will be available day or night all winter long for emergencies.

If you watch what one of our tower lifeguards does for a day on the seawall, you’ll see them watching swimmers and then getting down to move swimmers away from the rocks repeatedly. These preventative actions keep swimmers out of danger and keep our guards from having to make rescues that are extremely risky for both the victim and rescuer.

Working in a mobile vehicle is another story. We do the best we can to get to swimmers before they get too close, but we’re spread thin and covering a lot of ground, so end up making many more risky rescues.

We encourage you to get out and enjoy the best time of year in Galveston with friends and family. But when you do, remember the lifeguard presence is greatly diminished and the safety net is much smaller. This would be a good time to remind friends and family to stay far away from any structures in the water because they generate powerful rip currents. Know your limits and stay close to shore. Kids and non-swimmers should be in lifejackets. Designate a “water watcher” who is focused at all times on your group.

Lots of other safety information can be found at www.galvestonislandbeachpatrol.com and you’re welcome to get us on the phone or social media if you have questions. And, of course, for emergencies we’re only a 911 call away.

Storm Response

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Coming off the Labor Day weekend we all jumped straight into a hurricane. If we needed a reminder that Mother Nature is completely random and impartial with respect to our needs and wants, we’ve just gotten yet another one. I’m impressed with how quickly we bounce back. Things were opening the very next day and city, county, and Park Board crews jumped right out there and started fixing things like it was, well, a normal occurrence.

Even for us on Beach Patrol, we’ve got “normal” storm prep, response, and recovery down to a science. Coastal Zone crews got our towers off the beach the same day we made the call to pull everything off. It really helps that our Houston/Galveston National Weather Service Office is so responsive and proactive. The information we need is always at our fingertips. Once they forecasted tides over 4 feet, we decided to pull the towers off the beach. And when we saw that the wind was going to be over the tropical storm threshold, we decided to go to the additional trouble to get them down to the safe area that we store them in the winter. Coastal Zone Management and the Park Board Parks staff got the zillions of trashcans in the parks and all the way down the entire beachfront off the beach and out of harm’s way as well. That taken care of, we were able to divert our full attention to keeping people safe by making sure they were out of or in very shallow water, stayed far from structures that could cause rip currents, and off rocks once the waves started breaking on top of them. For the most part people were responsive and helpful for this one.

Once the storm passed, we immediately went out and started assessing how many of the 600 or so safety signs we maintain along the beachfront were lost. The next couple of days we had lifeguard crews out there picking signs off the beachfront, jetting stumps out, and re-installing signs that were down. All in all, we had 56 “No Swimming/Wading” signs, 35 “No Swimming” signs, 16 “No Swimming” icon signs, and 9 rescue buoy boxes go down. Many of these we were able to re-use by picking them up and re-installing them. Still, many were damaged or lost completely and had to be replaced with new ones. We’re still tallying but looks like it will be a bit over $20,000 worth of damage. The good thing is that we keep a roughly 30% reserve for just this occasion, so we have signs ready to pop back up there as we’re having new ones made to replace the reserve. We want to shorten the time the signs are down as much as possible for obvious reasons. In this case looks like we are able to get everything fully operational, including getting towers back out on the beach, in time for this weekend. We want to make sure all is good to go by the time the beach goers arrive.

 

 

Courtesy of Twitter
Justin Michaels (@JMichaelsNews) | Twitter
and The Weather Channel

Labord Day and kids with a bucket

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“Mr. Lifeguard, Mr. Lifeguard look what we caught!”

I turned around to see three cute kids running at me with a pail of water that was sloshing over the side. Dad followed them shrugging and smiling sheepishly as if to say, “Its out of my hands”.

Looking into the bucket I saw a mass of Japanese Jellyfish. Not the nice kind with the little almost clear, rice noodle looking stringy tentacles either. But the big mean ones with the brown, ropey, thick tentacles that bring back bad memories of swimming workouts gone bad and parents looking at me accusingly as I try to explain that I can’t magically make the pain go away that their kids are experiencing.

But this was a good thing. With Dad’s permission I explained that the current treatment is to rinse the water with saline, remove any tentacles that may be still on the skin, and rinse again thoroughly. Afterwards, you can treat for pain with ice or topical anesthetic. I drew a diagram in the sand of a tentacle and talked about the thousands of stinging cells, or nematocyst, in each square inch. And how each nematocyst can shoot out a tiny barb, or nematode that causes pain. Only about 10% of the nematodes typically fire when the tentacle contacts skin, so rinsing it in saline, or salt water, will help to wash away those cells that haven’t fired yet. That’s why we don’t use vinegar, uric acid, diluted bleach, alcohol, or any number of other treatments we’ve been through in the past. And why lots of home remedies like rubbing the area with wet sand, chewing tobacco, etc. usually make it worse.

We’d hit the max attention span for a 5–6-year-old, and the kids ran off to let the jellyfish free as I called in to our dispatcher “four water safety talks”.  As I turned back to what I was doing, I though about how cool it is that we get to have this type of interaction with tourists all the time, all over the beach, all year. In fact, last year, including school talks, we made over 30,000 “water safety talks” along with thousands of “tourist contacts” where we give out local information about the beach or about Galveston.

Labor Day weekend marked the end of the busiest part of the season, although beach activity will likely continue until the end of November or even into early December. This past weekend we were busy but not slammed. It was comparable to many of the busy weekends we’ve seen throughout the summer. We ended up moving over 12,000 people from dangerous areas, responding to 318 medical calls (most were jellyfish stings), made 3 water rescues, reunited 7 lost children with their parents, and made 147 enforcements along the beach. We also had 1,382 water safety contacts, similar to my discussion with the kids with the bucket of jellyfish.

At the end of the day, it’s the personal contacts that prevent drownings and keep our guests coming back.

 

 

Image courtesy of KSAT

Heat

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The knock on the door in the late afternoon wasn’t a surprise. Nor was the woman in her 70’s who was dizzy, a little disoriented, and sweating. Our Headquarters doubles as a first aid station for beach patrons, so its not unusual for people to show up with all kinds of medical emergencies including heat exhaustion. In this particular case, after taking her vitals and getting some medical history as well as an inventory of what she’d eaten, drank, and been doing for the day, we decided to rehydrate her and monitor her to see if she improved. After an hour or so she and her family left with a reminder to seek quick medical attention if the symptoms returned.

We are in some weird weather patterns fluctuating between storms and heat waves. Although in Galveston the actual temperature isn’t really that high, the real thing that worries us is the heat index, which is a combination of relative humidity and air temperature. When the relative humidity is over 60% it hampers with sweat evaporation and hinders your body’s ability to cool itself. Since in Galveston the humidity is pretty much always over 60% heat related illnesses are an ever-present danger in the summer.

Heat exhaustion is the first stage of heat related illness and is usually accompanied by some type of dehydration. We see heat exhaustion often on the beach in late summer. Many people spend the whole day in the heat and sun and often aren’t used to those conditions. Sometimes people who are outside regularly forget to hydrate or drink beverages that hasten dehydration. Generally, people will be confused, nauseous, dizzy, lightheaded, tired, have headaches or cramps, have pale or clammy skin, sweat profusely, and/or have a rapid heartbeat.

Normally, as was the case for this woman, this is enough, and we are able to treat at the scene and release them with a warning to take it easy for the next few hours or even days. This would be one example of the roughly 1,800 calls we’re able to filter for EMS annually. But if these measures don’t show improvement within a few minutes, we call for EMS because heat exhaustion can progress rapidly to heat stroke. Heat stroke is a critical life-threatening situation, so we want to avoid it if at all possible.

An important, but not well known, issue that affects our guards and people that are on the beach all the time is that of cumulative dehydration. New lifeguards often find that on the second week of work they are dizzy when they stand up or have stomach issues. They don’t feel thirsty so there’s no clue that they have become more and more dehydrated. Until they learn that they need to drink close to two gallons of water a day even if they’re not thirsty it will continue and worsen.

Living where we do in Galveston County it’s important that we are consciously aware of the effects and dangers of heat and sun and takes steps to mitigate them.

 

picture courtesy of news.okstate.edu