More Places to Swim Won't Automatically Make Us Safer
On a hot day, the call for more places to cool off makes perfect sense. But awareness and swimming skills carry more weight than concrete — otherwise we're just mopping the floor with the tap running.
Every warm day brings the call for more places to swim. Understandable, but it confuses the problem with the solution: the real bottleneck lies in swimming skills and awareness, not in the number of spots.
Every hot day, the same call grows louder: give us more places to swim, more ways to cool off. Understandable — people head for the water when it's hot, and when things go wrong we want to act fast. But after thirty years at the water's edge, I worry about the reflex behind it. We risk confusing the real problem with the solution.
As I've written before: the water hasn't changed, we have. And the heart of the matter isn't the number of places where you're allowed to swim, but what people can do and understand when they step into the water. Awareness and swimming skills weigh heavier than concrete — and there are three reasons for that.
We're mopping the floor with the tap still running
A new swimming spot is not a safety measure if the people who use it can't swim well or can't judge the danger. In that case, every extra spot only increases exposure. First the foundation — swimming ability, a feel for cold and deep water — and only then the spot.
Awareness scales, concrete doesn't
Every country has countless ditches, canals, ponds, rivers and lakes. You simply can't build a safe, properly equipped swimming spot everywhere — and it's precisely at that unregulated water that things most often go wrong. Awareness, on the other hand, does scale: what people learn, they carry with them to every water's edge, including where nothing is set up and no one is watching.
It shifts responsibility
The more we try to solve this with spots and facilities, the easier it becomes to think that safety is something that gets "taken care of." But water doesn't negotiate, and it doesn't check whether the spot is nicely laid out. Personal responsibility — being able to swim, staying sober, holding on to your child — remains the first line of defence.
Where things go wrong, the problem rarely lies in a shortage of swimming spots; it lies in skill and awareness. In the Netherlands, where I work, this is now playing out in full: swimming education is under pressure, and not every child still learns to swim well as a matter of course. The Netherlands isn't alone in this — similar examples can be found across Europe, from declining swimming education to children growing up without any swimming experience, though the picture varies greatly from country to country. That's where the bottleneck is, not in the number of spots. No new recreational lake makes a child who can't swim any safer.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not against good swimming spots — quite the opposite, beautiful and safe places to swim are valuable. But that's the second step, not the first. Reverse the order — infrastructure first, people second — and we'll build a country full of facilities that never touch the real problem.
So let's put our energy where it does the most good: learning to swim, learning to judge danger, and understanding that open water is never automatically safe. Invest in people first, then in places. That's not a popular message on a hot day — but it's the message that saves lives.
Swim-school owner · chair of NSWZ · founder of De WaterExpert and WaterZeker · thirty years of swimming lessons, fourteen summers as a lifeguard.