Surf zone hazards and injuries on beaches in SW France

Abstract

Surf zone injuries (SZIs) are common worldwide, yet limited data is available for many geographical regions, including Europe. This study provides the first preliminary overview of SZIs along approximately 230 km of hazardous surf beaches in SW France during the summer season. A total of 2523 SZIs over 186 sample days during the summers of 2007, 2009 and 2015 were analysed. Documented injury data included date and time; beach location; flag colour; outside/inside of the bathing zone; age, gender, country and home postal code of the victim; activity; cause of injury; injury type and severity. Injuries sustained ranged from mild contusion to fatal drowning, including severe spinal injuries, wounds and luxation. While the most severe injuries (drowning) were related to rip currents, a large number of SZIs occurred as a result of shore-break waves (44.6%; n = 1125) and surfing activity (31.0%; n = 783) primarily inside and outside of lifeguard patrolled bathing zones, respectively.Victims were primarily French living more than 40 km from the beach (75.9% of the reported addresses; n = 1729), although a substantial number of victims originated from Europe (14.7% of the addresses reported; n = 335), including The Netherlands (44.2%; n = 148), Germany (26.3%; n = 88) and Belgium (12.5%; n = 49). The predominant age group involved in the incidents was between 10-25 years (54.5%; n = 1376) followed by 35-50 years (22.6%; n = 570), with the majority of SZIs involving males (69.6%, n = 1617). Despite the large predominance (74.1%; n = 33) of males involved in the most severe drowning incidents, all of which occurred outside the bathing zone, a surprisingly large proportion of females (48.0%; n = 133) experienced milder drowning incidents involving only minor to moderate respiratory impairment, peaking at 58.2% (n = 85) within the age group 10-25. The spine/cervical injury population is very young, with 58.5% (n = 313) within the age group 10-20. Specific injuries tended to occur in clusters (e.g. rip current drowning or shore-break injury) with particular days prone to rip-current drowning or hazardous shore-break waves, suggesting the potential to predict level of risk to beachgoers based on basic weather and marine conditions. This study calls for increased social-based beach safety research in France and the development of more effective public awareness campaigns to highlight the surf zone hazards, even within a supervised bathing zone. These campaigns should be targeted towards young males and females, in order to reduce the number of injuries and drownings occurring on beaches in SW France.

Environmental controls on surf zone injuries on high-energy beaches

“…The SW coast of France hosts 230 km of meso-macrotidal sandy beaches that are visited by millions of tourists each summer (Brumaud, 2016) and are considered to be surf beaches. Castelle et al (2018a) showed that along this stretch of coast, a large number of bather SZIs occur due to shore-break waves and channel rips, with a large number of additional SZIs sustained whilst surfing. The combination of large tide range and variable incident energetic wave climate and weather conditions result in complex and highly variable patterns of SZIs.…”

“…Shorebreak waves are, on average, associated with a low proportion of surf zone rescues and injuries in most of existing studies (e.g. Australia (Brighton et al, 2013); 13% in UK (RNLI, 2017)), although higher proportions can be found (44.6% of the SZIs on the coarser grained and steeper beaches of SW France in Castelle et al, 2018a). More locally, shore-break waves were found to be responsible for over 82% of the SZIs at the steep beaches of Ocean City, Maryland (Muller, 2018).…”

“…The influence of interannual morphological changes on interannual life risk variability at a given coast is largely unexplored. Finally, shore-break and rip SZIs and/or rescues have been systematically treated separately in previous work, despite the fact that they can co-exist at certain surf beaches (Castelle et al, 2018a).…”

“…The combination of large tide range and variable incident energetic wave climate and weather conditions result in complex and highly variable patterns of SZIs. The primary aim of this paper is to build upon the dataset of lifeguard reported incidents of SZIs used by Castelle et al (2018a) by examining extensive environmental data, including local to large-scale morphological data, to address the primary environmental controls on the full life risk spectrum at a high-energy mesomacrotidal coast. This study also aims at addressing the genericity of the two composite wave and tide parameters to discriminate between low and high life-risk conditions.…”

Response to RC1

“…Shorebreak waves are, on average, associated with a low proportion of surf zone rescues and injuries in most of existing studies (e.g. 8.5 % of leading cause of rescue in Australia, Brighton et al, 2013;13 % in UK, RNLI, 2017), although higher proportions can be found (44.6 % of the SZIs on the coarser-grained and steeper beaches of southwestern France in Castelle et al, 2018a). More locally, shore-break waves were found to be responsible for over 82 % of the SZIs on the steep beaches of Ocean City, Maryland (Muller, 2018).…”