Economic Costs of Drowning Deaths

Public safety education and onsite supervision by lifeguards have helped keep drowning rates low for 40 years, and have significantly reduced the number of drownings in the United States. Still, the cost of a single catastrophic injury or death while using an aquatic facility can be substantial. Experts have described the costs of unintentional death through two measures. The economic costs framework measures the victim’s productivity loss and the expenses related to the event.⁸ Comprehensive costs include the economic loss, as well as the value of lost quality of life associated with the death or injury.

In 1997, the National Safety Council placed the economic value of each unintentional injury death at $790,000 and the comprehensive cost at $2,790,000 (National Safety Council, 1997). Using the drowning figures from beaches in the USLA reporting system, the comprehensive costs of drowning on coastlines in 1997 amounted to $273,420,000. From 1960 to the present, the total cost of drowning deaths at these USLA beaches is estimated to have been $4.2 billion. Factoring in costs of drowning in other aquatic facilities and the estimated annual cost of $138,000 per incapacitating injury, and the $180,000 annual cost for a catastrophic injury, the total costs of unintentional injury begin to climb geometrically. For comparison, salaries and benefits (typically 50% of costs) for full-time beach lifeguards range from $26,500 to $32,000 in Hawaii, Southern California and South Florida, where lifeguards work year-round. It is clear that providing a safe aquatic environment and instituting programs to prevent aquatic injury or death offer significant economic and social savings to society as a whole.

Although water-related injuries and drownings already result in tremendous costs, they would be substantially higher without lifeguards. One way of describing these costs is to estimate that one percent of the total rescues made by lifeguards would have resulted in a drowning death in the absence of lifeguards. In 1997, USLA recorded approximately 77,000 rescues for areas served by lifeguards. If one percent of these rescues (770) had instead resulted in death, either because the rescue had not taken place or because there were no lifeguards, then the economic cost of these deaths would be more than $600 million, and the comprehensive cost would exceed $2.1 billion.⁹ Using the same assumption, that one percent of the rescues instead resulted in incapacitating injuries (i.e., ones that would disable persons and permanently prevent them from performing some or all work), would yield a cost of approximately $4.1 billion per year over and above initial economic or comprehensive costs. If one percent of the rescues had instead resulted in nonincapacitating injuries (i.e., ones that requiredmedical care or hospitalization but would not result in disability), then the anticipated cost would be about $10.7 million for economic costs per year and $27.5 million per year for comprehensive costs. Table 1 in the Appendix includes cost estimates for different models using a lifeguard rescue effectiveness ranging between 1% and 36%.

While these estimates help demonstrate the range of costs of drownings and waterrelated injuries and the benefits of prevention on a national scale, the numbers may be so large that they do not assist decision makers working with a single, community facility. Mael, Seck, and Russell (1999) provide a helpful method of estimating costs on a smaller scale by converting the ratios to a given baseline of 10,000 patrons. They estimate the number of rescues needed if no preventive actions are taken, the number of injuries if there are no rescues, and the number of drownings if there are no rescues (i.e., no lifeguards present to intervene). This method provides minimum and maximum estimates of both the economic and the comprehensive costs of drownings and injuries at unprotected sites. They calculate that the total economic costs for not having lifeguards per 10,000 patrons ranges from $202,500 to $4.6 million and the total comprehensive costs per 10,000 patrons ranges from $705,380 to $16.1 million (see Table 2 in Appendix).

⁸ Included in the components of economic losses are: wages and productivity; medical expenses; administrative expenses of law enforcement, legal fees and insurance costs; and employer costs.

⁹ These figures do not estimate the costs of converting a death to an incapacitating injury because of a rescue.