Another beach, another floral tribute, another round of hollow official warnings about the unpredictable power of the sea. Following the devastating loss of the El-Khawas family—Hassan, Zeina, Sara, and six-year-old Saja—off the coast of Shoreham, the public script has rolled out on cue. Politicians express profound sorrow, vigils are held at Kingston Beach, and commentators nod gravely about open-water safety.
Stop right there. This routine is not just lazy; it is lethal.
Treating coastal tragedies as unavoidable acts of maritime wrath absolves a system that fails to educate the public on water mechanics. We do not treat highway accidents by simply noting that cars go fast. We engineer better roads, enforce strict rules, and mandate education. Yet when it comes to the ocean, society relies on the magical thinking that a sign reading "Danger: Strong Currents" serves as an adequate substitute for physical literacy.
The lazy consensus dictates that people drown because the sea is inherently malicious or because they lacked caution. That premise is garbage. People drown because they misunderstand fluid dynamics, panic when predictable forces act upon them, and possess zero physical frameworks for how to survive a rip or a sudden drop-off.
The Myth of the Rogue Wave
Every summer, mainstream reports lean heavily on the language of sudden catastrophe. Terms like "getting into difficulty" or "swept away" imply a malicious external agent dragging passive victims into the deep. Physics tells a completely different story.
When non-swimmers or casual beachgoers enter unfamiliar coastal waters, they rarely encounter a freak event. They encounter standard bathymetric features—sandbars, troughs, and jetties—that channel water in precise, measurable ways. Near structures like Shoreham Fort, currents interact with concrete and stone to create localized turbulence and complex eddies.
I have spent years analyzing coastal rescue data and operational safety protocols. I have seen municipal bodies spend millions on aesthetic beachfront regeneration while omitting basic survival signage that explains how water moves around structural barriers.
When a person steps off a hidden shelf into deep water, the physiological shock triggers an immediate panic response. The body hyperventilates. Lungs fill with air, increasing buoyancy incorrectly, while the panic-driven instinct is to verticalize and fight the water. Fighting a current is a math problem you will always lose. Water moves at a velocity that easily overwhelms elite athletes. Swimming against it is equivalent to sprinting uphill against a descending freight train.
Why Standard Advice Fails
The standard safety campaign tells you to "stay safe" and "take care near water." This advice is useless because it offers zero behavioral instructions for the moment panic sets in.
Telling someone to remain calm while their head dips beneath the surface is like telling someone having a heart attack to relax their chest muscles. Calm is not a default setting; it is a trained skill built through exposure and instruction.
Consider a scenario where a family visits a beach on a warm afternoon. They see locals wading near the shoreline. The water looks inviting. They do not know that a shifting tide has carved out a steep drop-off just three feet from where the footing was solid a moment prior. One step forward, and the floor drops away.
The parents, seeing a child struggle, instinctually move to help. This is where biology overrides logic. A drowning person will climb over anyone or anything to get air. In open water, multiple family members trying to save each other usually results in multiple fatalities. This is a known hydrodynamic and psychological reality that rescue professionals talk about in hushed tones, yet refuse to address transparently in public safety announcements.
Blaming the victim or writing it off as a tragedy obscures the real failure: our collective refusal to treat swimming literacy as a fundamental human right.
Reengineering Water Safety
If we actually wanted to stop people from dying off places like Kingston Beach, we would stop relying on candlelit vigils after the fact and radically overhaul coastal access.
First, coastal municipalities must install dynamic, visual indicators of current hazards directly on the sand, not tucked away on a faded plaque near the car park. If the water near a breakwater is lethal on an outgoing tide, the beach needs physical boundary markers that make entry impossible without scaling a barrier.
Second, swimming education must shift from indoor heated pools to open water environments. A child who learns to swim exclusively in a 25-meter indoor pool with lane markers knows nothing about salt water buoyancy, chop, wind resistance, or undertows. That is not swimming education; that is a false sense of security packaged in chlorine.
Third, we need to strip away the taboo of discussing how panic kills. Every school curriculum touching physical education needs explicit modules on floating, conserving energy, and surrendering to currents rather than fighting them.
The community of Shoreham is heartbroken, and the grief felt by the British-Palestinian community is immeasurable. But sending thoughts and prayers to the sea does nothing to protect the next family that steps onto the shore.
Tears dry. Waves keep moving. Fix the education, redesign the hazard zones, and stop pretending the ocean is a mystery.
