Newport Beach Marine Safety Chief Brian O’Rourke analyzed a dramatic photograph of 13 swimmers struggling in the ocean, swept out to sea in a massive rip current.
“They are getting pulled off their feet, watching the shore slip away… they are getting tired and exhausted,” O’Rourke said. “Fear and panic is setting in and the drowning process is starting to begin. These people are going to drown pretty quickly.”
While the photo was taken decades ago, it’s a scene that has played out time and time again — and if it weren’t for lifeguards in situations such as this, countless lives would be lost to the unpredictable, unforgiving sea each year as people flock to the coast.
Newport Beach lifeguards are marking 100 years of service along the city’s shoreline and it has been a chance to reflect on the department formed in 1923 and to celebrate successes and pivotal moments in its long history.
Before 1923, there was no lifeguarding service in the city, but as more people started showing up to the shore and tragedies occurred as beachgoers tested the waters, unaware of the ocean’s dangers, its need became obvious.
“People would go out in these waters, these massive rip currents and they would die out here,” O’Rourke said during a presentation recently to city officials. “And there was a community on the beach who said, ‘We need to provide a service to protect these beaches.’
“They went into a preventive-action mode,” he said. “They went out and stopped these tragic events from happening.”
Retired lifeguard Mike Brousard, who wrote “Warm Winds and Following Seas: Reflections of a Lifeguard in Paradise,” recounted a pivotal moment in Newport Beach’s lifeguarding history when, in 1925, a fishing boat overturned in massive surf.
Hawaiian Olympic swimmer Duke Kahanamoku, a regular surfer at Corona del Mar before the rock jetty destroyed the wave, along with Newport Beach’s first lifeguard Antar Deraga and fellow…
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