[Southsider2k12]

http://posttrib.suntimes.com/news/davich/7...X77WA8.facebook

Jerry Davich: Rip current warnings wash up on deaf ears

Lake Michigan isn’t a water park or a public swimming pool — all safe, regulated and supervised. It’s the real deal — beautiful yet dangerous, calming yet misleading, incredibly enticing yet potentially deadly.

I first wrote those words in 1998, after yet another deadly summer of Lake Michigan drownings, most caused by rip currents, the vacuum-like force in the surf zone of our deceiving Great Lake.

These deceptive currents are formed when winds from the north cause waves to break on sandbars near the beach. Excess water then flows back into the lake through low areas in the sandbars, causing a “rip” in the sandbar. The effect is similar to pulling the plug in a bathtub.

“The important thing to remember is not to fight it,” said Darrell Garbacik, former director for the Michigan City Parks Department, who told me this advice in 1998. “These currents create a tornado-type vacuum that can pull you under if you’re not aware of what to do. And 10 times out of 10 times, if you panic, you will lose.”

No one knows for sure, but it’s likely that Rayan Sami A. Bokhari panicked — and lost — last Sunday when he went swimming in the lake with friends, and soon disappeared in the waves near Porter Beach. The 22-year-old Valparaiso University student’s body was recovered the next day by a recreational boater almost a mile west of that beach.

“Nearly all the drowning victims and rescued swimmers this year have been from out of town,” Garbacik told me in 1998, referring to two recent drownings at unguarded beaches in the city’s Washington Park. “People are dying out there from the state of Michigan to Illinois off our beaches.”

Bokhari may have been a “local” VU student, but he came here from Saudi Arabia, and I’ll bet he didn’t know about the local dangers of rip currents in our deceptive lake. Officials said that his friends saw him struggling in the waves before he disappeared.

Another summer in Northwest Indiana, another drowning in Lake Michigan. And, again, the victim is not from this region, which doesn’t surprise me at all.

Immediately after Bokhari’s drowning death, several readers contacted me suggesting I write a column on Lake Michigan rip currents.

“You need to warn people that the lake is not a big swimming pool,” one reader insisted.

I told him that I’ve been writing such columns for 15 years, since I first began in this business. (My first beat was the Duneland area, its towns, parks and beaches.)

“The people who we need to educate about this issue usually don’t live here to read my columns or other local stories,” I replied. “They’re typically outsiders who don’t understand the deadly dangers underneath those beautiful waves.”

I’m guessing that most of you reading this column know all too well about rip currents and their deadly reputation in this region. It goes back much longer than 1998. The trick is getting the word out to those visitors, most who are also under the intoxicating influence of youth and feel invincible, especially on summer break.

In the meantime, Bokhari’s body is being returned to Saudi Arabia for a proper burial, not one under the deceptive waves of Lake Michigan