The ocean: friend or foe? Although it is easy to be enthusiastic about the sea’s ability to regulate climate and to produce both oxygen and delicious marine life that goes well with melted butter, it is also easy to recognize that the sea is an uncompromising bringer of death, a hotheaded bully who is perpetually ready to rumble.
The other day in the Rockaways, on the shore at Beach Eighty-seventh Street, the ocean was exhibiting its pugilistic side: four-foot waves, strong undertow—perfect conditions for test-driving one of the city’s new beach-patrol initiatives. For the past three years, New York City beaches have relied on drones to detect sharks and riptides, and now the gizmos are being used to drop flotation devices on swimmers in trouble. This summer, a stretch of the Rockaways will be patrolled by two all-terrain vehicles, each bearing a drone pilot as well as a rescue swimmer, who can assist lifeguards as needed.
A correspondent who had volunteered to pose as a swimmer in distress cast a wary eye at the surf.
“What kind of a swimmer are you?” a ruddy Fire Department captain holding a walkie-talkie asked him. (The drone program is a collaboration between four city agencies; the F.D.N.Y.’s drones are piloted by its robotics division.)
Before the correspondent could say “slow and steady,” the captain barked, “All right, you’ll wear a flotation vest just in case.”
John Wakie, a firefighter who would be piloting the drone, demonstrated its payload of two rescue devices, called “restubes”: lightweight, six-inch-long tubes (resembling Totes travel umbrellas) that, on contact with water, inflate into a pair of foot-long, log-shaped flotation devices. “Usually, I try to drop the restubes within arm’s reach of the swimmer,” Wakie told the correspondent. “But my goal today is to drop them on your head. If they’re too far away from you, you’re not going to be able to grab them. So for the sake of this drill I won’t drop until I see you look downward, so they don’t hit you on your face.” Suddenly, the mandated flotation vest seemed like a terrific idea.
The two firefighters instructed the correspondent to swim out from shore, past seven sets of breakers, where a scrum of surfers lingered astride their boards. The correspondent entered the water, which was fifty-seven degrees, and laboriously swam about a hundred and fifty feet out, whereupon he started waving his arms at Wakie and his colleagues on the shore.
At a press conference this spring, Mayor Eric Adams, upon hearing that the drone pilots might be able to communicate with swimmers via loudspeaker, mused that he himself should supply the audio, “because I have a calming voice.” So the flailing correspondent found himself imagining the Mayor’s Brooklyn rasp booming “Daddy’s here!” from on high.
Ninety seconds later, the correspondent heard a whirring sound as the drone—a two-foot-wide black “X,” equipped with four propellers—flew to a position fifteen feet directly above him, sounding like a hummingbird that had mistaken his ear for a petunia. As instructed, the correspondent looked downward. Seconds later, the two restubes landed near him and burst to life.
Placing the restubes under his armpits, the correspondent bobbed for two minutes and then noticed a rescue swimmer hurtling toward him with a big orange buoy. “Let go of those and hold on to this!” the swimmer, an F.D.N.Y. employee, said. He then grabbed the correspondent around the chest and gracefully escorted him to shore.
Back on the beach, the correspondent towelled himself off and waited for his heart to unhammer. An F.D.N.Y. lieutenant, William Pitta, walked over to him and pointed out to sea, near where the rescue drill had just taken place.
“Lifeguards just pulled three people out of the water on the other side of that jetty,” Pitta said. “They got stuck in a rip current and got dragged out.”
Given that there was no signage on the beach about the new drones, the correspondent decided to spread the word among beachgoers so that, if they were ever imperilled while swimming, they would know that the objects raining from the sky were not part of a secret Totes ad campaign. All the sunbathers whom the correspondent talked to were intrigued. One swimmer thrust her arms skyward and said, “Praise technology!” The only aberrant response came from a gaunt middle-aged man on a towel. “I don’t really swim, so it doesn’t affect me,” he said, appearing to be in search of the calm to be found at the intersection of ultraviolet rays and the latest Sally Rooney novel. “But I’m still waiting for a delivery from Amazon.” ♦
