This year, as of the end of July, Kyiv’s lifeguards and emergency service’s workers have saved at least 64 people from drowning. Up to 25 people have drowned in Kyiv so far in 2017, according to the Emergency Service of Ukraine.
Last year, 57 people drowned in Kyiv, while Kyiv’s lifeguards saved 114 people, 26 of whom were children. Countrywide, 1,300 people drowned in Ukraine in 2016. However, that’s a big improvement on just two years before, in 2014, when 2,220 people drowned in Ukraine’s rivers, seas, lakes, and waterways, according to Ukraine’s Emergency Service.
In the summer of 2015, about 30 volunteers started patrolling Kyiv’s beaches on weekends.
The Kyiv authorities noted the team’s effort and invited the volunteers, who had already registered a non-government organization Beach Patrol Kyiv, to reform the state-owned municipal beach patrolling service.
Now the athletic lifeguards of the Beach Patrol, which has been informally dubbed “Kyiv’s Baywatch” after the popular 1990s U.S. drama series “Baywatch,” keep an eye on most of the capital’s beaches.
Read the full story about Kyiv’s Beach Patrol.
