equipment budget, meaning there would be no new equipment purchased and on-going training would cease. Next year’s lifeguard training academy may be eliminated and there would be a hiring freeze, Canning said.
The priority, however, is to keep the lifeguard towers along the beach open until sunset, Canning said.
“The lifeguards can’t conceive of closing the towers early,” he said. “If it happens, we would advise people not to go in the water.”
As lifeguards wait for the board of supervisors to adopt the county budget in June, they are beginning to prepare themselves and the beach for the masses who will flock to Santa Monica Beach.
Lifeguard towers, which have been dormant all winter, are being moved to permanent summer locations on the sand, the buoy line south of the pier has been put up and on-call lifeguards are being brought in when the beaches fill up.
Memorial Day weekend — unofficially the beginning of the summer — attracted nearly 500,000 people to the beach between Santa Monica and Marina del Rey. While the weather was gloomy most of the weekend, Memorial Day’s hot weather and sunshine brought close to 400,000 people to the beach in one afternoon.
During that weekend — between Santa Monica and Marina del Rey — L.A. County lifeguards made 39 rescues, prevented 4,764 potential incidents from happening in the ocean and responded to three boat distress calls.
Lifeguard captains stationed at the headquarters next to the Santa Monica Pier monitor beach activity and estimate how big the crowds are. When they see people arriving in droves, they call in part-time recruits.
“A lot of them are professionals and do it for the love of it,” Canning said. “You get such a rewarding feeling. It’s a great job.”
More than 600 lifeguards are on call on a as-needed basis. They tell lifeguard captains when they are available and are then put on an availability list.
“We’re prepared to staff our beaches pretty much every day of the week,” Canning said. “If it starts to get busy, we’ll call them up.”
During the middle of winter, there are usually only one or two lifeguard towers open on Santa Monica Beach. Typically, they are the towers located near busy areas, like the Santa Monica Pier and Bay Street Beach, a popular place for surfers.
By the end of this month, all of the towers will be brought out and positioned just yards away from each other. At busier locales and times, the towers will be staffed by two lifeguards instead of just one, Canning said.
The primary goal for lifeguards is to prevent incidents from occurring. They are there to keep people safe from the hazards of the Pacific Ocean, which can be ruthless at times. And while the goal is prevention, lifeguards on L.A. beaches still make more than 9,000 rescues a year.
Lifeguards constantly scan the water between the towers where they are stationed so there are always two sets of eyes on the people in the water. They watch for changing conditions, like rip tides. Sometimes they’ll instruct swimmers to either get out of the water or swim somewhere else.
“We are helping people in bad situations get into good ones,” said Canning, who has been a lifeguard since 1979. “We are stopping them from doing something that is harmful and we tend to spot them before a tragedy happens.”
Rip tides account for 80 percent of all rescues, he added.
“Our job is to watch the water at all times,” Canning said. “We are reacting to what could happen.”
The main headquarters at Santa Monica Beach is staffed 24 hours a day and is where the underwater recovery team is based. It also houses the central nervous system for the phone lines connecting the 50 lifeguard towers in Santa Monica. “It’s a big job to maintain the equipment especially in the spring when we do maintenance,” Canning said. “Every time we move a tower, we have to move a phone line.”
Because the headquarters is manned 24 hours a day, the lifeguard serves as the eyes and ears for the local police and fire departments.
Capt. Mickey Gallagher, who is in charge of the Santa Monica headquarters, said L.A. lifeguards have a unique relationship with the Santa Monica police and fire departments.
Santa Monica used to have its own lifeguard department until 1974. But then the county and the city combined resources and other cities like L.A. soon followed.
“It’s one of the best response systems and the example in Santa Monica is a model for the rest of the country,” said Gallagher, who has been a lifeguard since 1972. “We can shift resources to fit the need and we are much more efficient because of that.
“We were able to eliminate a lot of fluff and it has saved the taxpayers millions and millions of dollars,” he added.
The only other 24-hour headquarters are at Zuma Beach north of Malibu and Hermosa Beach in the South Bay. The station located at Will Rogers State Beach, which was put on the map when the popular “Baywatch” television show was filmed there, is a now a sub-station and serves the beaches north of Santa Monica.
There are 160 full-time lifeguards in Los Angeles and new recruits have to go through rigorous training to make the cut. L.A. County takes the top 80 or 100 out of close to 400 applicants each year. Two classes are held annually and recruits go through 110 hours of training, usually on weekends. Most of the training occurs in the ocean when water temperatures are in the 50s and 60s.
Recruits have to pass a physical, a 1,000-meter swimming test and a background check, as well as being able to demonstrate that they can relate to the public effectively, Canning said.
“It’s been the same skills for decades — things don’t change much in our profession,” he said. “It’s one person going into the water usually going to get one person.
“Good judgment, though, is by far the most important quality we look for.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 2, 2003. Read the original PDF.