Atop a craggy peninsula, you look out as the ocean stretches across
the horizon like a piece of string pulled taut along the wide sky.
Waves smash into rocks below you, slowly growing in intensity.
What started as a gentle breeze has whipped up into a gale.
You take cover in the doorway of a nearby lighthouse, and as you
continue watching the vast sea, you notice something interesting.
The waves, once random and scattered,
have arranged themselves into a grid?!
Like a checkerboard, the waves now sail toward
the cliffs in squares, in both directions!
If you see these squares, you know to get out of the water immediately.
But, these right angled killers aren’t the only
water based phenomena that are angling to drown you.
In a single year, these “drowning machines” took the
lives of over 100 people in the United States alone.
So what are these killing machines, and how can
we avoid something that hides in plain sight?
Let’s get into it!
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It’s not often we see straight lines in nature,
so when we do, it’s even more unnerving.
If you saw the recently discovered “Martian
Doorway”, you know just how spooky uniformity can be.
Seeing the fabled square waves of Île de Ré is a sight to behold.
It’s like a giant chessboard made out of moving water, isn’t that wild!?
Ok, so technically, they’re not called
square waves but cross waves, or cross seas.
These waves party way too hard to be square.
Cross waves are two opposing swells that
intersect each other at near 90 degree angles.
A swell is a term for a series of waves created by distant weather systems.
When storm systems cause disturbances in the ocean,
those disturbances ripple across the ocean as swells.
These storm systems need to be large though, a gentle breeze
rolling across a beach in Miami isn’t enough to make a swell.
Whenever the ocean does something unusual it’s almost always a bad sign.
In this case, cross waves are a phenomenon that makes sailors nervous.
In hard sea conditions, ships have to travel
perpendicular to waves at a slow speed.
If a large swell hits a ship from the side,
it’s much more likely to tip over and capsize.
With cross waves, they come at you from both sides.
It’s hard to go straight into something
that comes at you from two directions.
But what happens when cross seas are closer to shore, at beaches?
Multiple videos show cross waves on shores near places
like Tel Aviv, and Île de Ré, just off the French coast.
Could you swim in these?
While the most dangerous thing about this wave formation concerns
ships at sea, cross waves are still a danger to unassuming swimmers.
When a ship capsizes, it’s a disaster.
When a human capsizes, it’s embarrassing, but
being knocked over by a stray wave won’t kill you.
These cross waves are still dangerous though, and if you
see them you should get out of the water immediately.
Look, I don’t need an excuse to not be in the ocean, but square
waves can be killer to even experienced endurance swimmers.
Just remember when waves be square, riptides beware.
The National Weather Service in the United States, to illustrate
the dangers of riptides, have collected stories from survivors.
In August of her 13th year, Emily, her cousin, aunt, and
uncle, all piled into the car one Sunday, headed for the beach.
After settling in the beachhouse they were staying in, the four of
them strolled across the street, and decided to head into the water.
The family moved further and further out into the wake.
The waves were small, and under the hot summer sun, the family
flourished in the gentle tilt and fro of the warm clear water.
Suddenly, the ground disappeared beneath Emily’s feet.
She looked around in a panic, when she heard her
aunt utter 4 words that still haunt her to this day.
“Can anyone else touch?”
Over the course of the last 45 minutes, the imperceptible riptide
had slowly been pulling them further and further out to sea.
The sandbar, once their anchor to the land, was now just out of reach.
They all started to panic.
The waves, taller and stronger now, crashed
against them, yanking them further out to sea.
Emily’s aunt and uncle shouted for help,
but no one on the shore seemed to notice.
Emily dove under the water to see if she could push
herself close to the rapidly vanishing floor of the
ocean, but still, the riptide dragged her backward.
As she tried to surface, a dawning horror fell over her mind.
The water was getting deeper now, and as the waves grew even taller
above her, she furiously kicked her way to the surface, but to no avail.
She couldn’t reach.
Her lungs burned as her body struggled to
breathe, forcing her to gasp down saltwater.
She was drowning.
Pure exhaustion had begun to take over when
she saw her cousin’s hand reaching down.
Emily, with her last rush of strength, reached back out and took it.
Her head broke the surface of the treacherous water, and
she took a long breath, but before she could even think
about appreciating it, she realized: Not only was she
drowning, “she was watching her family drown as well.”
“The waves just kept doubling in size and
there was nothing any of us could do”.
She wasn’t going to die without a fight, though, and Emily
started grasping and reaching for the sandbar with her feet.
After an eternity, the joyous, and lifesaving sensation of soft
sand between her toes flashed like lightning through her whole body.
She curled her feet, desperate to cling to the
mucky lifeline she’d found, and lunged forward.
As she landed, the soft sand was no comfort, as the
rest of her family were still being pulled out to sea.
Looking back, she saw her family drifting
out in a meandering line away from the shore.
Emily was closest, firmly on the sandbar, next was her
cousin, then her uncle, and furthest out was her aunt.
Emily stretched out her arm and her cousin did the same.
They inched closer to one another.
The waves, still breaking over them.
Success!
Emily had her cousin’s hand.
The rest of her family linked hands, and
Emily hauled them, finally, to dry land.
But what are riptides, and why are they so dangerous?
When waves hit a beach diagonally, water still has a way to
wash away out to sea without building up too much energy.
However, Riptides, or rip currents, occur when waves hit a beach at
a 90 degree angle, leaving no easy escape for water to wash away.
In the space between two waves, the displaced water collides
against other waves, and through the path of least resistance,
jets back away from the shoreline with great power and speed.
The trouble with riptides is how they can carry you
so far out to sea that you can’t swim back to shore.
Like Emily’s family, you can be dragged out into
the ocean without noticing it’s even happening.
Fear and panic leads to exhaustion, which
is deadly when you’re treading water.
While most riptides are too slow and weak to drag you out to a
watery grave, they can reach speeds as high at 5 miles per hour.
Oh wait, that doesn’t sound too fast.
Ah ok nevermind, the most decorated Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps,
clocked a top speed of 4.7 miles per hour (7.56kmph), and that was only 200 meters (0.12 miles).
The best way to keep yourself safe, like most things, is avoidance.
On many patrolled beaches, local lifeguards or authorities will post
colored flags to indicate specific hazards and other information.
Depending on your area, a green flag can indicate a beach
is safe to swim, but a red flag indicates weather or
water conditions are dangerous and the beach is closed.
There are other flags that indicate other things, which
you can see on screen now, through the power of technology.
However, the absence of flags does not mean the water is perfectly safe.
In terms of visually identifying riptides,
there are a couple signals to watch out for.
If you see gaps between waves breaking on the
beach, that’s a surefire signal of a riptide.
You’ll also notice that riptides are discolored, since the high
velocity of the stream kicks up sand and other particulate debris.
Checking your local Weather service, like the American
National Weather Service’s Surf Forecast can inform
you on beach conditions before you even get there.
It’s also beneficial to swim near lifeguard stations on patrolled
beaches, so if anything goes wrong, they can go all Baywatch on you,
and you can ask them about swimming conditions before you go in as well.
Over 100 people in the United States lose their lives every year
to riptides, but they’re not the only waterborne killers around.
These “drowning machines”, between 2019 and 2020, took the lives
of 111 people in the US alone, and continue to do so, as we speak.
An 11 year old boy in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania
was swept under the water of a low-head dam.
There was no record of the dam being there, and when first responders
arrived on the site, the boy, Payton Gonzalez, was already unresponsive.
He was transported to Wellspan York Hospital where
medical staff were unable to resuscitate him.
The Spring Grove Dam is what engineers call a “low-head dam”, or a weir.
These concrete dams do the very basics of what dams are meant to do.
They usually span small rivers, and were most often used
to create small reservoirs for water powered mills and
factories in the time before widespread electrification.
Back then, at the height of these dam’s construction, in the
19th century, the most consistent source of power was water.
The problem is, while many of the factories and mills that used these
dams have long since been closed or relocated, you can’t just move a dam.
Property owners are then forced to maintain these dams with no purpose.
Unfortunately, it’s all the more common for these dams to be
abandoned, doomed to a geriatric life as a remnant of a dead past.
You may think that the danger of these dams is from
overflow, or breaching, but that’s not the case.
Since these dams are generally pretty short, and don’t
contain a ton of water, a breach will mess up your basement,
but won’t cause massive flooding to destroy a town.
However, these dams do present a public safety threat
that has caused more fatalities in the US than all
dam failures and accidents in the last 20 years.
You’re swimming upstream from a low-head dam, a thing you should never do.
The water is calm and moves around you slowly,
such that you can kick waves here and there.
You realize you’re being pulled toward the edge of the dam, so you
start swimming away, but to no avail, and you tip over the side.
As you’re carried over the edge of the dam,
the water moves quickly, like a waterfall.
You can see the difference between types of flowing water in your sink.
When you turn on a tap and the water hits the bottom of the
sink, the water moves very quickly at first—supercritical,
then slows down in the shape of a ring—subcritical.
The problem with low-head dams is a little thing called a “hydraulic jump”.
When fast moving water hits slow moving
water, it generates a “jump” in the flow.
However, when the slow moving water is high enough, this “jump”
can become submerged, creating a vortex called a “keeper”
because it “keeps” you underwater, so it can murder you.
Fast moving water coming down the dam hits
the bottom of the stream and flows upward.
Then, since it’s submerged, it’s redirected back toward the
dam, where the fast moving water pushes it back down again.
Creating a churning vortex.
Sometimes, the upward moving jet of water
breaks the surface creating a “boil point”.
You can recognize this because it looks like boiling water from above.
If you see water moving as if it’s boiling, do NOT go in.
These kinds of hydraulic jumps exist in a lot of large rapids,
and any white water kayaker will be able to tell you all about how
dangerous they are, and how fun it can be to surf on top of them.
But make no mistake, these dams are immensely dangerous,
and you should NEVER swim in, by, or near them.
Not only can the vortex drown you, it often
traps debris which can knock you unconscious.
The water is often very cold, threatening
hypothermia even if you do manage to escape.
Not only that, but low head dams almost always span the
width of an entire river, so even if you try to escape by
moving along the dam, you won’t be able to find calm water.
On top of all of this, “keepers” generate
lots of bubbles too, which decrease buoyancy.
This is why they’re “drowning machines”.
It’s not that it just creates a water vortex of death, it’s all of
these things together that make it almost impossible to survive.
If you’re ever caught in a low head dam’s hydraulic jump,
The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources writes that the
best thing you can try is to ball up as small as possible.
Tuck in your chin, pull your knees into your
chest, and wrap your arms around your knees.
At that point, your life is in the hands of our sweet mistress lady
luck, and if you’ve been particularly kind to her, she might sweep
you along the bottom of the river past the boil line, at which
point you can push off the bottom and try to make it to the surface.
Water is the most important, and most abundant resource on Earth.
It’s the most powerful force natural to our planet.
Moving water has carved canyons, shifted mountains, and dictated
where we can live before we were even able to give voice to language.
Riptides and keepers at the bottom of dams are really
among the lesser powerful things that water can do.
What’s a single human trapped in an underwater vortex to
an Eldritch force that literally created the Grand Canyon?
What makes water so scary is how mundane its incredible power appears.
When you look at a river, all you’re really
seeing is, pun intended, surface level.
Just below lies a writhing, flowing, moving
energy that’s likely been there for centuries.
It was born before you, and will flow long after you’re gone.
There are lots of other dangers surrounding
water, and the things we build on top of it.
The takeaway is that while some phenomena have that instant
“wow” factor, like square waves, what’s visible on the surface
isn’t always a good indicator of what’s happening below.
Just like you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, or
an iceberg by its tip, don’t judge water by its surface.