The riskiest public holidays in the water, particularly when your tipple is topped with alcohol

If you are male, swimming at a beach or a local river on New Year’s Day or Australia Day, and it is heatwave hot, your risk of dying in the water is 22 per cent higher than for women.

Add in a few too many beers, and the danger of a watery death increases even more, says leading water safety expert Dr Amy Peden.

The NSW government warned on Wednesday that New Year’s Day is one of the highest-risk days of the year for coastal incidents and drownings, with tragedies three times more likely than on any other day. “If the sun comes out on New Year’s Day, and swimmers flock to the beach despite the mild weather and celebrate with an alcoholic drink, the risk goes up,” it said a statement.

The Minister for Emergency Services Jihad Dib said every summer “we see people overestimate their ability and the consequences can be devastating. Most water-related tragedies are preventable, and it only takes one poor decision to change lives forever.”

Today is the most dangerous day to swim in any body of water in Australia, with the risk of drowning seven times higher, said Peden, a senior research fellow in the School of Population Health at the University of NSW. The risk on Australia Day is five times greater.

Like many water safety experts, Peden has come to dread these holiday periods “because I know there will be spikes in drowning”.

Her analysis found that New Year’s Day and Australia Day accounted for 4.7 per cent of 4100 non-fatal and fatal drownings incidents (197 total incidents) in the 12 years to June 2022.

The rate on public holidays was four times higher than weekdays. The rate on weekends was nearly twice as high as the average weekday, and school holidays were more than double days when children attend school.

Peden and others attribute these high-risk days in the water to a toxic combination of public holidays and high alcohol consumption on rivers, lakes and beaches (though officially banned in many public places). If some swimmers were driving, they would have been as much as twice and three times over the safe limit in Australia.

When she tested people swimming and boating in NSW and Queensland rivers, including on Australia Day, for her research, she found 16 per cent of people had been drinking alcohol, with the highest readings nearly 6.5 times higher than the 0.05 legal limit applying to adults driving a car or operating a boat.

The cool weather has brought some relief. Last year, a person fatally drowned every day of summer, including 40 in December. This December, 20 people fatally drowned in the water, the annual summer drowning toll shows.

Peden said experts had done a lot of work to educate the public on water safety, but the 10-year high in drowning deaths to 357, a rise of 27 per cent on the 10-year average, suggested more should be done. She contributed to two water safety quizzes embedded in this story.

She urged the public to take extra precautions. As a parent of two young children, she prefers – if she can – to have one adult available to supervise for each child. If heading to the beach, she checks the Beach Safe app for weather conditions, and she asks the local lifeguards about the conditions, and for help in identifying rips.

She also brings a flotation device. That could be an esky or a pool noodle – something that will help someone stay afloat in case of an emergency.

Water safety experts say the numbers disguise a much greater problem, partly because of a failure to use the correct terms (fatal drowning and non-fatal). For every person who fatally drowned, as many as 15 people suffer non-fatal injuries that require hospitalisation and can cause lifelong injuries including brain damage.

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