MILWAUKEE – In the first week of June in Wisconsin, well-kept Lake Michigan hikers strolled through the volleyball nets with rainbow-striped sticks and an oceanfront cafeteria menu featuring sausages. , quesadillas and mojitos.
Only one thing was missing. Instead of the traditional wooden lifeguard supports, there was a cherry red lifebuoy and a sign: “There is no lifeguard on duty. Swim at your own risk. “
Lifeguards are frustratingly scarce this year, leaving tens of thousands of the country’s swimming pools closed and beaches unattended, and the public is moving away from an unconditional American summer.
In Milwaukee County, where temperatures have reached the 1980s and students have finished school, a network of public swimming pools is more closed than open. At least five facilities have been closed and four swimming pools will be open to the public, officials said. On the popular beaches of Lake Michigan, swimmers must navigate on their own through the crashing waves and dangerous waters.
Recruitment problems are spreading across the country: Austin, Texas officials said they have not yet found lifeguards ready for half of the 750 positions they hope to fill. In Cincinnati, hiring was so short that only eight of the city’s 23 pools could be opened.
“It seems like an unresolved issue,” said Jim Tarantino, Milwaukee County’s deputy director of parks, who manages the city’s swimming pools over the enclosures. “We are as devastated as the community.”
City officials and industry experts point to a number of factors driving the shortage of lifeguards. The low unemployment rate has given young people many job options. Due to Covid-19-related limitations during the pandemic, swimming lessons and lifeguarding courses were often suspended for parts of the last two years, making holes in an already weak training channel. And employers choose from a smaller group of applicants: in states like Wisconsin, there are simply fewer teens than in decades past, as residents have increasingly opted for smaller families.
“It’s the worst we’ve ever seen,” said Bernard J. Fisher II, director of health and safety for the American Lifeguard Association. .
Even for swimming pools that remain open, many are canceling swimming lessons and assigning their instructors to work as lifeguards, which complicates the problem of training in the future. “If we don’t keep training new lifeguards all summer, it will be a long time before we get out of this,” Mr. Fisher.
Desperate to help, cities and private employers have hung up benefits and raised hourly wages. Six Flags St. Louis has offered up to $ 18 an hour to lifeguards and has promised a $ 500 bonus. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, the parks department covered the cost of lifeguard training this year, helping to attract enough applicants to equip their pools.
In New Orleans, known for its hot, humid summers, lifeguards receive $ 15.91 an hour, a jump of just under $ 12 an hour last year, said Larry Barabino Jr. New Orleans Leisure Development Commission, the organization he leads. city parks and swimming pools.
“We’ve been on the news, we’ve been on social media, we’ve been on the radio,” Mr. Barabino.
But it didn’t work. Only five of the city’s 13 seasonal pools will be open this summer. And to Mr. Barabino worries that teens have fewer recreational options, especially when their families can’t afford expensive private camps and vacations.
“The challenge for some young people is, will there be a chance to walk to the pool in their neighborhood?” He said. “It simply came to our notice then. They will not be able to swim every day. “
Austin’s public pool network is slowly coming back to life as hiring increases, and Aaron Levine, an aquatic supervisor, says he expects the department to do better than last year to meet its goals. . But he is concerned that the shortage of national lifeguards has implications for the safety of swimmers, especially for children who are not proficient in water.
“It’s hard to see,” he said. “It’s 100 degrees in Texas. If they don’t come to the neighborhood pool guarded, they’ll find a body of water somewhere.”
Many unused pools across the country show signs of deterioration, with weeds sprouting from the cracks in the concrete. The Milwaukee Washington Park pool is one of them, with its mint-green trampolines hovering over an empty pool and a low-key building next door.
Mike Ithier, who lives a few blocks away, sat on his porch one recent afternoon and lamented that the local pool, surrounded by a water-drained chain link fence, was not available to neighborhood children.
He has lived in the city for decades and remembers his own days as a teenager in the seventies: when he was 14, he got a job as a lifeguard in that same pool.
“Then it was beautiful,” he said. “You went there with your bike, you checked your bike, they looked at you and you paid 25 cents to go swimming.”
A short drive to Bradford Beach on Lake Michigan, where the sign warned visitors that there would be no lifeguards on duty, some Milwaukean residents said the absence seemed like a loss for a beloved ritual.
Tyesha Shareef, 29, was on the beach during a break from her real estate job, spending a quiet time looking at the water in her car. She has fond memories of going to the beach when she was little, she said, when lifeguards were plentiful and the crowds were bigger.
“I remember it was so great then,” he said, adding that even though his 2-year-old daughter could swim, he wouldn’t want to take her to the water without a lifeguard, knowing how quickly a child can escape. and everything. father vigilant.
“I just don’t think it’s safe,” Ms. Shareef said. “It’s not the same.”