Beach Safety - Water Always Wins

To kind of go back a bit, you bring up the wind, and I don't know that people realize how much that wind plays on Lake Huron.

So southwest, west, and northwest, especially when you have these piers.

So we look at Kincardine, Grand Bend, even Bayfield.

These piers that jut out, those winds from southwest, west, and northwest, they not only create us the waves...

but they do create those issues when striking the piers.

And then the east wind, what lays the lake down flat, that's what gets anybody with sailboards and stuff in trouble because it's always a high wind that puts them out to the middle of the lake.

That offshore, right? Like they're just blowing people out into the middle of the, on little dinghies and float, yeah.

On floaties, but it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful wind because it always lays the lake flat.

Megan, can you get into some basics about things like eddies or riptides? Everybody hears that.

Riptide to me is a great 1980s TV show.

So we don't actually have necessarily riptides in the Great Lakes.

Like tides are much more of like an ocean force, but it's the rip currents.

We have structural currents.

There's about 15 or 16 different types of currents that can form in the Great Lakes.

And this was really kind of the focus of a lot of the research that the University of Waterloo was doing to drive the stoplight is actually connected to a machine learning model.

So there was three years during the first sort of initial years of the Smart Beach Project where they had instrumentation down there and they were just basically collecting data.

They had a buoy out in the lake.

You know, trying to capture all those various scenarios that would help form the basis of that model so right right now we're operational for the pilot of this this project so at the end of this.

If based on all of the, we're going to be doing a lot of surveys down at the beach, talking to people because it's the human behavior change that we're after.

We don't want to just show that we can prove that we can make a stoplight turn colors because that means nothing if people don't follow it.

So the survey is really the game changing part of this study in the sense that it's to validate that it's actually making a difference.

So going and talking to people to say, you're looking at the lake.

Does this look like a green to you? It's green currently on the light.

Does that match your perception of what a green is? Because we all have our varying abilities, like you were just saying earlier, right? Some of us are lifeguards and other of us have maybe never had swimming lessons.

So water is dangerous period as just innately, given that we are not fish bearing creatures and we can't breathe underwater.