Girl disappears in the waves, what is rip current?

On October 4, a 4-year-old girl disappeared on Nanhui Xincheng Beach in Pudong, Shanghai, for more than 60 hours, and many searches were unsuccessful. Police, fire and rescue teams worked for days, but the girl's whereabouts are unknown. Pudong police and fire organizations of 200 people and 6 rescue teams conducted a comprehensive search, checked the surrounding monitoring probes, and preliminarily ruled out the possibility of others taking them away. The suspected girl was found in the surveillance, walking towards the water's edge, falling at the water's edge and disappearing into the waves. According to reports, the beach where the girl went missing is a muddy beach hit by the rip current, not a scenic spot.

Rip currents are the leading cause of drowning on offshore beaches, with approximately 80% of beach deaths worldwide due to rip currents. So what are rip currents?

Rip currents are dangerous

A rip current is a narrow, powerful stream that flows outwards in a direction perpendicular or nearly perpendicular to the coast. Its width is generally not more than 10 meters, the length is generally between 30~50 meters, and some are as long as 700~800 meters. Although this stream is not long, it is very fast, and the flow rate can be as high as more than 2 meters per second. Because this current often carries swimmers to the shore, it is also called a rewinding flow.

The mechanism of rip current formation

How are rip currents formed? When the waves hit the coast, they collapsed due to obstacles, and a large amount of seawater had to find a way back into the sea, but due to the push of subsequent waves, these seawater would initially move parallel to the beach, and finally converge into one or more powerful currents and retreat into the sea, and the above process occurred to form a rip current.

According to the causes of rip currents, the main locations where rip currents occur are: 1. the waters between two crescent-shaped sandbars (that is, between the two beach tips); 2. Where the wave line is not continuous (that is, where the white wave breaks), visitors should avoid such waters.

Rip current escape direction

What to do when you encounter rip currents? Rip currents can occur in any weather conditions, and Qingdao No.1 Beach and Xiamen Coconut Wind Village Beach are high incidence areas for rip currents. When encountering strong rip currents, do not try to swim back to shore against the current, but follow the direction of the current in the direction parallel to the beach, get out of the current and then turn back to the shore.