Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series, the first part appearing in the June 28 edition. Today’s column is a description of the bureau as it exists today. In the last column we took a brief look
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series, the first part appearing in the June 28 edition. Today’s column is a description of the bureau as it exists today.
In the last column we took a brief look at the Ocean Bureau’s history, where it came from. Today we’ll look at where it is and where it’s headed, and at its toughest challenges and its greatest achievements.
The first and foremost challenge, of course, is the job itself — keeping yourself in a state of high vigilance and being ready at a moment’s notice to put yourself in harm’s way to save a life. With the conditions that our Hawaiian open-middle-of-the-Pacific surf can generate, this challenge is not for anyone lacking in body or spirit or training.
The next most immediate challenge is to activate the nine new positions that have been budgeted for this fiscal year (four at Anahola, five at Ke‘e), and also to make specs for, put out bids for, purchase, and finally put in place the accompanying “infrastructure” equipment. Regarding the former, the good news is that every year the bureau takes on “summer hires,” and this year they have seven such individuals working. They seem to be doing very well and to have a great attitude and an interest in full-time employment, and so the hope is that they will transition into the full-time positions that are now open. That still leaves two more open positions. If you’re a skillful and brave water-person who wants to start a career, please apply.
The latter challenge — getting the equipment on line — will simply require diligent and persistent work by our administrators (who, by the way, don’t have a bureau secretary). I’m very pleased to report that the Island Supervisor position, which was approved in this year’s budget and which was officially posted on July 1, has been temporarily assigned to the redoubtable Kalani Vierra; and so this work is in very able hands, pending the permanent hire of our Kaua‘i Supervisor.
The bureau has another very big challenge ahead of it, and I hope that this year will be a key year towards meeting this challenge. In my last column I noted how the work of a lifeguard has been radically upgraded from a sit-in-your-tower job description to a take-care-of-all-of-Kaua‘i’s-beaches expectation. Their compensation package, however, has not shown a corresponding upgrade. This issue gets very complicated very quickly, since this kind of issue has to go through the union which represents the lifeguards (HGEA), and it’s not anything that can be lobbied for by advocates (such as myself) or legislated by our council or mayor or fire chief. Once the union is brought up to speed with the lifeguards’ wishes and plans, it then has to present the matters to the county and revised contracts have to be drawn up and approved.
Compensation issues that are in place in the other Hawaiian counties and that are not in place here include hazard pay and JetSki operator’s pay. The definition of “hazard” has to be spelled out — for example, on O‘ahu the lifeguards at Sandy Beach and Waimea Bay (and maybe certain other beaches) are considered to be in hazard conditions at all times, and the guards at those beaches are awarded higher pay. At other beaches, hazard conditions vary with the ocean conditions. Similar considerations apply to the lifeguards that are JetSki operators. These upgrades in compensation — and there are others that I don’t have space to go into — not only put bread on the table, but they also provide a “career ladder opportunity” and along with that, an overall morale boost and long-term satisfaction-potential for our lifeguards.
The groundswell for all this has to come from “the bottom up,” that is, from the lifeguards themselves. Lifeguards tend to be rugged individualists, which you have to be in order to survive surf conditions that would quickly kill you and me. And many of them, because their salaries are low, take a second job, evenings or weekends or both. So getting them all together to strategize and present these issues to the union is no small feat. Although the groundswell has to be from the bottom up, we’ll be relying on our leadership to organize the rumblings that will need to happen. Our team of ocean safety advocates is totally behind this effort and we will help however and whenever we can.
Other challenges include more positions, improved administrative structure (in particular a training supervisor and an Eastside supervisor), and ever more covered beaches. Our ocean-safety advocacy group will also keep plugging away at these, I promise you.
OK, I spent a lot of my space on the challenges and now I have only a few moments to describe the triumphs. Check out a few numbers: Last month the lifeguards at Tower 1 (Hanalei Pavilion) recorded 16 rescues, 1,622 preventions, with 16,000-plus estimated beach-goers. That’s the busiest of our current eight towers so we can’t accurately multiply those numbers by eight to get our islandwide numbers, but these are serious numbers.
Not all of these rescues require death-defying feats for the lifeguard (although they’d be a heck of a challenge for you and me). But as for the moments that come along and that challenge one’s mental, emotional and physical capabilities to their very limits, I believe that Hawaiian lifeguards’ moments are as critical as anyone’s in any job in the world. Life and death and brain damage and spinal cord damage are in play, split seconds count, conditions are critical and in every way life-threatening — and time and again our Kaua‘i lifeguards have handled these moments in spectacular fashion. Such are the triumphs, and I trust that they offer our lifeguards some very gratifying moments even as they take on their difficult challenges. In future columns we will find space to review in detail some of these critical rescues, as well as the training that underlies them.
• Monty Downs is an emergency room doctor at Wilcox Memorial Hospital. His column appears every other Wednesday and will return to the Wednesday slot, July 25.
