Lifeguard placement is not appropriate for the beach.
Not all beaches will be open for swimming on Memorial Day weekend, when the season officially begins, because the city only has a little more than a third of the lifeguards it needs.
Department of Parks and Recreation officials announced this week that only 230 lifeguards have been hired so far out of the 600 needed to fully staff the beaches, which open Saturday.
“The employment environment is very difficult and challenging, especially for this group of workers,” Parks Commissioner Sue Donahue said at Monday’s City Council budget hearing.
A national lifeguard shortage and the city’s “extensive” and “intensive” 16-week training program are making it difficult to find enough personnel, Donahue and other officials said. said the person.
The city’s lifeguard program is designed to prepare trainees to properly patrol New York City’s 14 miles of beaches and swim in rough seas.
“We have to be able to do extensive testing to see if we can recover something in the water as if it were a human being. It’s very complicated,” said City Parks and Recreation Department 1st. Deputy Chief Iris Rodriguez Rosa said at the hearing.
More than 550 lifeguards are currently in training, compared to just 375 at the same time last year, Rodriguez Rosa said.
Officials attribute the increase in applicants to the city’s increase in hourly wages from $21 to $22 an hour and a $1,000 bonus for lifeguards who stay until the end of the season.
With the return of seasonal workers, city officials said they expect to have about 900 lifeguards on duty at the pool by the end of June, when it opens. More than 1,500 lifeguards are needed to patrol both the beaches and pools.
The city had about 900 lifeguards last year, but the shortage meant some pools and coastal areas had to be roped off.
“We are confident that this year’s total will be higher than last year,” Meera Joshi, Mayor Eric Adams’ deputy mayor for operations, told reporters Tuesday when asked about the shortage.
Ideally, the city would like to have 1,000 lifeguards, but “we can’t expect to reach that optimal level,” Joshi said.
“560 members have gone through the training program so far, which is much more than last year,” Joshi said.
Park officials said none of the city’s eight beaches will be completely closed over Memorial Day weekend. Instead, New Yorkers can expect portions of each beach to be closed.
“We plan to open the beaches on Memorial Day, but some parts of the beaches will still be closed,” Joshi said.
The Park Service determines closure locations based on daily lifeguard staffing, officials told the Post.
“We want to open as many beaches as possible,” Adams said Tuesday.
The mayor raised eyebrows earlier this month when he weighed in on the lifeguard hiring debate, suggesting the city could fill the shortage by hiring immigrants because “they’re good swimmers.”
Adams told reporters the next day that he made that comment after he asked a room full of immigrants who could swim and many raised their hands.
The lifeguard shortage comes as drowning deaths in New York state are at an all-time high. In 2021, the last year for which data is available, 230 New Yorkers drowned. In total, from 2017 to 2021, more than 1,000 people drowned in the state.
