The reaction of some here, who claim to be firefighters, causes me to lose respect for their opinions as posters here.
I am not sure if this is the union mentality, as your post implies, or just that their responses regard hypothetical situations and avoid what we know to be the facts in this situation.
Perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.
In your anecdotal study, how many of those rescues were of a threatening man?
Maybe you need to put a first responder every other house along the shore then you wont ever have to rescue anyone!
Spot on about the “spectators union”.
There’s not a lot of information in the SF Gate link except for the fact the drowned soul was standing with at least his head above. No mention of surf if any or type of bottom, but in any case those are not go-no go factors. Nor was his estimated weight of 300 lbs.
I’ll make only one assumption; he was standing in salt water. And even that makes a difference only because a fat man is more buoyant than one with less body fat.
I was trained for life guard certification by toughest teacher in the DC metro area. At age 52 or so he was no more than 5ft 6in tall and maybe 150 lbs. Yet he had no trouble in turning any of my forty or so male classmates and locking them up in a cross chest carry and taking them to the shallow end even we were told to fight him as hard as we could. We were all extremely good swimmers with excellent endurance and probably at our peak fitness levels and most substantially stronger, yet he took us all. Note I did say that he lifted any of out of the water, just to a shallower depth where the victims head was safely above water and non swimmers could even help.
A key element of the training was to assume that every victim was panicked and should be approached carefully as they tend to try and climb your head. A chest kick and turning the victim quickly gave one a hard hold. A feistier victim was taken under utilizing the panic reflex to release the rescuer.
To cut a long story short even th smallest woman in our class succeeded against her largest male counter parts.
End of story is that he could have been swept off his feet put into a hold and walked his floating whale carcass to shallower water where further assistance was available. I’ve done with big nasty drunks and have seen women do the same.
Anybody could have twisted a shirt, slacks or a towel to offer this soul a chance to change his mind withou endangering themselves.
No comment on the union folk.