Drowning
DEAD IN THE WATER
(Drowning is no way to go. I know. I tried.)
(c) David Astle
Wind and rain batter the deck. Lightning flashes. From the gloom a siren blasts the message to abandon ship. We scramble to the muster point, wrestle into life jackets. We count to see who’s missing. 1, 2, 3…you holler to be heard…7,8,9…the cold is biting…11,12,13. All here. All freezing. All swallowing fear.
‘Free the pelican hook!’ yells Neil the lobsterman. The hook, a steel beak locking the liferaft in place, resists numb fingers for a time, then kicks open. Tugmaster Rick slides off the webbing. The trout guide ties the painter, the rope that leashes raft to ship. We lift the capsule from its cradle. On a chant of three we throw it clear, a reckless sea burial, the coffin splatting onto the ocean.
The coffin splits open, both halves sinking without trace. Orange and rumpled, a lifeless raft blooms across the water, etched into view by the lightning, and Neil’s feeble torch. An eel farmer from Deloraine yanks the painter tight. The hiss we hear beneath the chaos is CO2 gas escaping from a cylinder sleeved within the raft. The rubber fills. A canopy wobbles upright.
‘Go, go, go!’
The oldest man, a ferry owner, climbs down the rope ladder first, taking an age to cover the three metres. Another wild sky-flash – God taking snaps of our disaster – sees the climber fall blind onto the raft’s mattress. By mistake the eel farmer throws the boat’s rope into the sea – our best chance of survival is now drifting from the parent ship.
‘Kedge!’ barks Michael the abalone diver.
‘What?!’ comes the ferryman. Already miles away.
‘Find the sea anchor! Tow yourself back to the ladder!’
The words are lost. The vocab is lost. Maybe we are lost.
The deckhand jumps overboard. There seems no smarter idea. Others clamber and push out, seeking the raft, but most of us jump like so many lemmings, pinching noses and hurling our bodies into the darkness. In my rush I’ve neglected to cinch my jacket. As I hit the water it pops off my shoulders like a mock parachute. I swallow a gobful of icy water. I’m cold and scared and sinking. I’m drowning.
++
Living on an island with 30,270 kilometres of coast and over 25 million pools and bathtubs, most Australians have a drowning story to tell. Professor John Pearn has heard too many for one lifetime. With drowning his specialty at the Pediatric Department at the Royal Brisbane Hospital, Pearn can see danger in a bucket of water. A dam. A drain. An irrigation ditch.
Though backyard pools are the leading killers. ‘That danger virtually didn’t exist until 1970,’ says Pearn. ‘In 1974 an epidemic started. Within a 25km radius of Brisbane, over the ensuing 25 years, almost a 1000 children were fished out dead, or apparently dead. Over half responded to resuscitation, which means there were about 400 fatalities.’
Roughly one death every three weeks – and that’s Brisbanites of a certain age alone. After car crashes and household falls, drowning is our country’s third biggest ‘accidental’ killer. Latest figures show we lose 245 Australians a year to the liquid medium, the equivalent of a Manly ferry capsizing every summer with no survivor in sight.
Pearn calls it the drowning window – the time it takes for humans to go from immersion to death. ‘Nobody knows exactly how long it takes to drown a child, but the time is somewhere between 3 and 10 minutes. Most children fished out in under 3 minutes respond to resuscitation. Most over 10 we never get to save.’
While kids are at higher risk of drowning, they also have an inbuilt advantage over adults.
Pearn again: ‘When water goes onto a child’s face, the diving reflex immediately slows their heartrate, the blood pressure goes up, and all the circulation is closed – with the exception of the brain and heart. I don’t want to overstate it, but we think that children have an extra 30 seconds to survive in a drowning scenario. That sounds trivial unless you appreciate how precious those seconds can be.’
++
Cold and blind, pedalling in the void, I cherish the trivia all of a sudden. Little by little grownups are thought to lose the diving reflex but right now I’d fork out a fiver to get the impulse back.
My brain is electric with panic. I open my eyes to see vague shadows of other legs above me, riding phantom bikes in the sea. The cord at my ear is the life jacket’s string I cling to and pull, shooting back to air. I gasp in the rain.
A dim fairy light signals the raft at a distance. Men are shouting. A whistle shrills. Looping my head inside the canvas collar, I feel momentarily safe. I hustle the vest around my ribs. I might be floating but the drowning fear stays with me – in humans it seldom leaves us. I find my whistle – each jacket owns a different musical note – and bleat into the night.
++
This story is devoted to sailors on the Winston Churchill from the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race. Sword of Orion and Business Post Naiad. To the little girl in Sydney who tried to reach a floating leaf. To the men of the Kursk submarine. The Margaret J trawler off Burnie, the refugees off Java, the Titanic off the Grand Banks, the Lonergans off Cairns. To Maccabiah athletes and Contiki canyoners. To Harold Holt and Robert Maxwell. To Jeff Buckley in the Mississippi. To the Avalanche, the Amphitrite and every other boat that sank to reach this island. To 245 Australians, and half a million others around the world every year.
++
Kent Harstedt was 28. Sara Hedrenius was 20. They didn’t know each other until the night they almost died.
Holidaying, the Swedes were exploring Eastern Europe in 1994. Part of the trip meant skirting the Baltic coast in the Estonia, a roll-on roll-off giant that ferried over a 1000 passengers.
Massive seas peeled off the bow door. Black water flooded the cardecks. The ship listed, bunks and bodies slid. Kent and Sara clambered to the lower rail, facing the void. People were screaming, praying, skidding off and drowning. It was 6 degrees out of the wind, the water below even colder.
Sara recalled, ‘We promised to have dinner together in Stockholm if we survived. We held hands and jumped.’
Kent told how his foot was caught by a rope. ‘There was water in my mouth and nose. I thought of my family…and I said goodbye. I blacked out. The next thing I know my foot came loose and I came to the surface.’
The pair scrabbled into a raft. They hugged to keep warm. The two Swedes, and 139 other people, would eventually survive the savage night. Most did not. Some rafts had flipped – the sea deemed too cold or wild for anyone to risk righting them. Breaking swell and Arctic winds saw 900 people drop overboard and surrender to the Baltic.
++
Drowners enter a sequence known as the hypoxic march. Going by Pearn’s description, you don’t want to go there. Hypoxia, common to mountaineers, is a shortage of oxygen supplied to the body tissues, and a soft-soled killer that puts near-drowners into the obituary columns. When 5-year-old Sara Jevtic lost consciousness in Werribee Pool in 2001, she went on a time-honoured journey that often has no return.
‘A child falls into the water,’ explains Pearn. ‘She’s out of her depth. She holds her breath. The diving reflex starts. There comes a breakpoint where you’ve got to breathe underwater. Instantly water rushes into the voicebox which goes into spasm. It’s frightfully painful as you know when one drop goes the wrong way, let alone a whole mouthful…
‘At that point in time the heart then overcomes the diving reflex and things start to speed up. Fairly soon after, consciousness is lost. By this stage we’re into 2-2½ minutes here.’
(Sara floated face down below the waterline, limp as a doll, a kid playing possum, or seaweed games, but this was no game. Sara was drowning in a pool of 100 oblivious people.)
‘Pulse rate then starts to slow, because the heart doesn’t have enough oxygen. Brainwave tracing goes flat. The tissue start to build up big oxygen and acid debts.
‘The next step is open breathing underwater, more water brought into the lungs. Very rapidly water goes from the lungs into the blood circulation. At that stage the heart stops beating. Some time after that the brain dies. Then comes somatic (or total) death.’
Thankfully not for Sara. Teenager Andrew Maier saw the girl’s floppy body near the bottom and dived in. Maier knew the basics of mouth-to-mouth, but it was slinging the girl over his shoulder that she spluttered into life. A pulse strengthened. Sara was on hand to see her rescuer win a bravery award from State Parliament three weeks later.
++
Invisible hands haul me from the water into the raft. The sodden tent is crowded, miserable, glorious. I cough up a mouthful of water that tastes of raw chlorine, not brine. Our sea is not the sea. The eelmen and trout guides around me are training for survival.
Our abandoned ship is not a ship but a steel-sided platform beside a drowning pool. That’s its nickname. The hangar belongs to the Australian Maritime College in Launceston, Tasmania. Here cadets and yachties and fishermen validate their seafaring tickets, and undergo hell.
The rain falls from sprinklers in the roof. The waves are generated by jetpipes under the surface, plus excess water spewed from the holding tank. The wind blows courtesy of a 10-volt fan, its banshee wail a tapedeck. Lightning is a fluoro twitch. The steel shutters on the windows guarantee night, while the I-beam on the ceiling will soon suspend our helicopter harness.
For all the hi-tech hokum, the horror feels no less real. When yachtsman Tony Bullimore relived his capsize ordeal for ABC cameras, he came to the AMC Survival Centre in a scale-built hull. In 1985, Princess Di panicked when the lights went out, and vanished from the gallery before the storm could start. Three months ago a Fijian naval officer died of a heart attack here – getting dressed – though Laurie ‘Hawkeye’ Hawkins insists the mishap could have happened anywhere.
Hawkeye plays God twice a week, applying his own brand of havoc to bosuns and lobstermen or anyone game to visit the centre. Twin dragons on his legs speak of his 24 years in the navy, touring most corners of 47 million square kilometres Australia calls her own, roughly one-ninth of the earth’s surface.
‘Drowning,’ says Hawkeye, ‘often comes from hypothermia and hyperignorance. The first is where your body core temperature of 37 degrees is under threat, and the second is why you guys are here.’
For the first four hours Hawkeye peppered our group with videos of ferry disasters, the Hobart Hall of Horrors. He passed around an EPIRB (an Emergency Radio Indicating Radio Beacon) and drew flow charts of death, and survival. He demonstrated flares, jackets, the lost art of kedging. He warmed to the topic of freezing.
‘It’s not natural for a human being to jump into cold water. You’ll experience sharp pain, cramps, uncontrolled gasping. In our throat we have a little thing called the epiglottis, like a skin flap. In cold water, when you suffer a laryngeal spasm, the flap closes over your windpipe, and you can suffocate to death.’
The Great Southern Ocean is tailor-made for drowning. In Tasmania, the average sea temperatures of 11 degrees – and 4 degrees inland – are cold enough to kill, but never cold enough to suspend circulation. Further north, off Melbourne and Sydney, your chances of surviving climb by degrees. In Canada a boy lasted 50 minutes submerged in a subzero lake, recovering without ostensible damage. The body enters a diapause, or suspension – a medical miracle unlikely to occur on a waterway near you.
++
Drowning in Dutch is Drenkelingen, a fatal extension of their verb to drink. Holland hosted the The World Conference of Drowning in 2002, and Dr Ian Mackie was a guest of honour. The man who introduced oxygen to every Australian beach (a world first), Mackie recently retired as National Medical Advisor for the Royal Lifesaving movement after 17 years.
Mackie also pioneered mouth-to-mouth in rubber duckies, plus practical exams for many lifesavers who battle with literacy. The trained cardiologist has seen half a dozen dead bodies fetched from the surf.
‘The worst thing about resucitaing a near-drowner is that they vomit all over you. That’s the best sign there is! It means they’ll recover.’
Gathering the grisly numbers is one of Mackie’s tasks, though a child is 12 times more likely to drown in a backyard than a beach. ‘My wife and I were thinking of downsizing our home last year. We viewed smaller houses (in Wahroongah, Sydney), all of them had swimming pools and less than half were fenced. Of those fenced, were fenced inadequately. It’s an absolute disgrace.’
Mackie is aware of the Lazarus syndrome, that benign utopia that the dying and the drowning supposedly visit. ‘Cardiac victims describe a scene from a Mary Poppins movie, where you go into a yellowy-green valley full of cows grazing and friendly people.’
Though trout guide Rod Turton had no such vision two years back. He recalls dropping his hat in his dinghy. He let go the tiller, crouched and caused the boat to skew upwards.
Suddenly Turton was airborne. His back smacked the top of the outboard. In a blink, he was bobbing in Dee Lagoon in Central Tasmania, no life jacket, his jumper sucking in 5-degree water, 200 metres from shore. Heavy boots. Drowning.
He had no clue where the boat was, or the prop blades. As a stroke of luck the dinghy had locked into orbit, and Turton grabbed the side on its next lap around. His thermals were leaden and it took an almighty effort to get back on board. ‘I got back on shore and told my wife to get a fire going. It scares me to this day,’ he says.
The human body may comprise over 90% water, but 1% too much around us and the struggle to exist gets drastic. ‘Hopefully I can teach people survival skills,’ says Hawkeye, ‘but I can’t teach anyone the will to live. That comes from within, it’s that reason to keep going. It might be your wife, your husband, your dog, your God. It might be your Harley-Davidson.’
[Sunday Life, December, 2001]