National lifeguard shortage impacting northern beaches

Lifeguards are hard to come by these days; causing northern municipalities to only offer coverage of certain beaches. It is yet another shortage caused by the pandemic.

“We knew that there was going to be some hiccups and some challenges that we were going to go try to overcome as we were starting our beach program. We weren’t anticipating to have so few lifeguards than what we have right now. Typically we would have anywhere between 14 and 18 lifeguards that would be in our roster for our three beaches that we guard throughout the summer and unfortunately this year we are down to like ten and 11 lifeguards and you know that really limits what we can do and what we can safely guard at our beaches here in North Bay,” says Bryan Kimber, community development coordinator for the City of North Bay.

Normally in North Bay there would be three beaches with lifeguards present; in 2021 the city was only able to cover one beach and now in 2022 they are up to two. The supervised beaches this summer are Shabogesic Beach and Olmsted Beach. Kimber says there are a couple of reasons for the shortage.

“I think its because we’re coming out of covid and there was two years of students and young people not going through the process of getting their national life saving society certification and finding other employment so I think we’re kind in this position now where its going to take us a year or two in order to replenish the stock of lifeguards across our municipality here but then also across the province itself.”

Meantime in Sudbury officials say offering extra courses throughout the pandemic allowed them to have a full compliment of lifeguards.

“What we don’t have are a lot of extras. So on a regular year we’d like to have a number of people waiting in the wings for when a lifeguard might get sick or you know needs to be away for a period of time. We do have some to fill-in but we don’t have as many as we would like to have,” says Cindy Dent, manager of recreation for the City of Greater Sudbury.

Greater Sudbury has 7 supervised beaches and 34 full time staff have been hired this year to cover them. Many of which have been pulled from the city’s pool portfolio, which under normal circumstances isn’t done. Dent says lifeguards are critically important, especially in a community that is home to 330 lakes.

“The municipality is thrilled to provide supervised beaches to people so that they can be in the water safely and on top of that you know offer our five municipal pools to be able to train children and adults how to swim and how to be in the water safely as well.”

Lifeguards are on duty from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sudbury and noon to 7 p.m. in North Bay seven days a week.

Today kicks off National Drowning Prevention Week. According to the Lifesaving Society’s 2020 Drowning Report most Ontario water-related fatalities happen in a lake or pond but only one per cent happen in a lifeguard-supervised setting.