What to do if you're caught up in raging floodwaters

The dangers posed by rushing waters werebrought home to Nova Scotiansafter police announced that last weekend's flooding had claimed multiple lives.

The bodies of a 52 year-old man and two children have been recovered, and a young person is still missing after the vehicles they were travelling in got swept away by floodwaters on Saturday.

A 31-year-old man is also missing after going tubingon the Gold River in Lunenburg County on Monday. The RCMP said they believe he was swept out to sea.

Michael Melenchuk, the executive director of the Lifesaving Society of Nova Scotia, told CBC Radio's Maritime Noon the dangers posed byrushing water should not be underestimated.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

When it comes to rushing water conditions of the type that we've been seeing this week, what do you encourage people to keep top of mind?

What we want people to keep top of mind is that what's at the surface of the water doesn't necessarily reflect how quickly that water is moving.

There can be debris in that water. There's lots of unknowns, things that we don't see, simply standing on the edge of a river or on the edge of a lake, so we have to be careful.

Some people talk about being a strong swimmer and maybe being inturbulent water in the past. Talk a little bit more about the debris.

The flooding causes a lot more hazards to suddenly appear. We always encourage people to know where they're going swimming, where they're getting in the water, where they're boating and where they're tubing because there are so many things that happen once you're in the water things like debris.

We have a lot of beautiful rivers, we have amazing beaches here in Nova Scotia. But below the surface there's drop-offs, there's fast currents in rivers and especially if you're not familiar with that piece of water, it can be very dangerous that it can happen very quickly.

Right now with the flooding water, everything's changed. They're not what they were just a week ago. And so it's really important to use caution around those bodies of water.

How often do drowning incidents happen when someone is not actually swimming but maybe taking part in another activity?

In Canada, we've been collecting statistics for a few decades now and we found that over half of the people that drowned did not intend to get into the water.

It comes a lot from the fact that we have a very active boating culture in Canada canoeing, power boating and things like that the people in those boats had no intention ofgetting into the water.

Even things like rafting and tubing. Most of the time we're thinking of ourselves as simply sitting above the water. But when yourtube flips, when your raft starts to go over, all of a sudden you're in the water unexpectedly.

And that's one of the reasons in Nova Scotia that we've been delivering this Swim to Survive program to Grade 3 students.

Is this the program where people specifically learn skills when they're unexpectedly thrown into the water?

We try to deliver to Grade 3students. We want to catch them young and encourage them to be comfortable around the water, especially in this province because we have so many lakes, rivers and thousands of kilometres of coastline.

We don't do a full swim lesson. We focus on three skills. The first skill is that unexpected fall into water.

Most of the time we're doing this during the school year, so we're using indoor pools. But we asked them to roll or fall into the water so that it simulates that unexpected plunge into the water.

Next, the students will try and right themselves and we ask them to tread water so they can find that point of safety.

Once they have come to the surface and they orientate themselves, then we ask them to swim 50 metres.

This is based off our statistics that we've collected in the past. A lot of people that drown, they didn't expect to fall in the water and they were very close, sometimes less than 50 metres, from a point of safety.

Extending that to the scenario of a rushing river, if you do find yourself suddenly thrown into a river or falling into a river, what more can you do?

When we're talking about ocean,we often talk about riptides pulling people out and in rivers that are moving fast sometimes people try to swim against it.

You should never try and swim against that river. It's a losing battle. What you want to do is swim to the shore, directly to the shore. Whatever the closest shore is, you want to move in that direction and not waste your energy by swimming against the river.

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