NSRI Drowning Prevention Manager, Andrew Ingram, says their dream has finally come to fruition, with the delivery of the first NSRI Survival Swimming Centre to Meiring Primary School in Riebeek Kasteel.
“Children often don’t get to have swimming lessons because of financial barriers,” Andrew explains. “The other thing that prevents children from learning to swim is having a safe piece of water to do it in. And lastly, the absolute nightmare is a child drowning in a swimming pool. These problems all mean that what is needed is a safe indoor swimming pool that can be moved anywhere.”
The Drowning Prevention team came up with an ingenious solution to these problems. They decided to build an NSRI Survival Swimming Centre inside a twelve-metre-long shipping container. The centre features a six-metre-long swimming pool, an office space for the instructor, and a change room for the students. The pool is one metre deep, so small children can stand in it, and it can be locked up to prevent anyone from accessing the pool.
The 6-metre length of the pool comes from the World Health Organization’s directive, which states that you need to teach children to move through water for at least 5 metres.
The ambitious project came with a number of challenges, which the team overcame through partnerships with various companies. One of these challenges was how to ensure that the water is kept clean. It required an excellent filtration and circulation system, as it would be used many times in one day.
“A company called Fluidra came to the party with an absolutely top-of-the-line system, which is automated, so the survival swimming teacher just needs to focus on teaching swimming. I can look at my cellphone at any time of the day and I can see the water temperature, and the pH and acidity levels. And we can monitor everything that happens in the container from our Emergency Operations Centre (EOC). We have a camera in the container, and the EOC and I get an alert when someone enters. We can then access the camera and see who is entering.”
The first phase of the project is being trialled and tested at Meiring Primary School.
