A riptide expert says Prince Edward Island, as well as the rest of Canada, needs stronger education around beach safety, especially after several people were rescued from dangerous waters at P.E.I.'s Lakeside Beach earlier this week.
Chris Houser, Dean of Science at the University of Waterloo and associate professor in environmental science, has studied rip currents along the Island's North Shore extensively with his team.
He believes education can be lifesaving, but Canada is falling behind.
"We don't have a national lifesaving strategy. In the United States, they used to have an entire riptide awareness week," Houser said.
Houser said the P.E.I. government should step up its efforts to educate both residents and visitors. He recommends providing materials at key points of entry to the Island, like at the airport, Confederation Bridge, car rental desks, hotels and Airbnbs.
"It's not a panacea to provide these signs, to provide these warnings, but at least you're starting to build that education," he said.
Houser said swimmers, especially those at unsupervised beaches, can learn to recognize rip currents by watching for certain visual cues: a scalloped shoreline with waves breaking on either side and a seemingly calm channel in the middle. That calmer-looking water is actually the current pulling back offshore.
"They're hard to spot, but you can eventually start to learn and be able to see them along the entire North Shore," he said.
His team's research goes beyond identifying rip currents; it also examines how people behave on beaches, including their response to warning signs, flags and lifeguard instructions.
One finding, he said, is the role of confirmation bias, which is the tendency for beachgoers to assume it's safe if they see others already swimming, even when conditions are dangerous.
"If I see somebody else in the water, but it still shows me a yellow or red flag, and the conditions look rough, but that person in the water is not drowning, well, I should be OK," Hauser said, adding that this mindset leads many people to ignore critical safety warnings.
"We've seen that really particularly in the Gulf Coast of the United States, where the vast majority of rescues and drownings actually happen when people's perception of the water was different from that of the lifeguard."
Therefore, Houser recommends people swim only at supervised beaches with lifeguards trained to assess local conditions.
He added that many places around the world have some innovative safety strategies. In Costa Rica, for instance, there are "surf ambassadors," who are local residents and understand the area. They walk the shoreline, place flags to mark dangerous areas and intervene when visitors approach risky spots.