Doctor Ostapenko warned about the danger of bungee jumping into the water

More and more tragedies – especially they have become more frequent this summer – are due to inept jumps into the water, including those with the “bungee jumpers” beloved by children and adults. On July 9, at the Sredny Kaban lake in Tatarstan, a guy jumped from a bungee rope right on the head of a 15-year-old girl who was swimming in the lake with her friends. The girl died from her injuries.

Rescue divers who arrived at the scene of the emergency removed her body from a three-meter depth, 10 meters from the shore. “The cause of the incident is non-compliance with safety rules at water bodies,” the Tatarstan Ministry of Emergency Situations said in a statement.

Earlier, a tragedy with a surface bungee took place in mid-June in the west of Moscow. In the village of Rublevo, a 15-year-old boy died after swinging on it and jumping into a river. A friend of a teenager tried to save him, but could not, while he almost choked himself. The body of the bungee boy was found only an hour later – “he could not surface, because he jumped very far.”

Many are familiar with accidents due to fatal jumps into bodies of water. A young man dived, hit the water and remained an immobilized disabled person for life … Another jumped off a cliff into the river, hit his head on the bottom and died in the hospital a month later.

Most divers remember the mortal danger of hitting the bottom or objects under water. But not everyone knows that you can also be killed by hitting the surface of the water.

– A person’s lack of knowledge about the technique of entering the water – and there must be a certain technique that is taught – and leads to such tragedies, – Leonid Ostapenko, sports doctor, member of the International Association of Sports Sciences ISSA, explained to MK. – Firstly, the body should be as straight as possible, and secondly, there should be as much vertical entry into the water as possible. In such cases, the negative consequences of the jump are practically excluded, – however, this is if we are talking about sufficient depth. If you vertically enter the water in shallow water, you can hit the bottom with your head, which threatens with injury or death.

But even if the depth is sufficient and there are no dangerous objects in the water in the jump zone that you can hit, there is still a risk to life due to incorrect entry into the water – at an angle, on your stomach or on your back.

In this case, water hammer can occur, which compresses the cavity of the abdomen and chest. That is, hitting your stomach against the water, you can exhale sharply, and then, being under water, instinctively inhale. And breathe water, not air.

The third danger, according to the doctor, is cold stress, which can occur quite unexpectedly. A sharp difference between the temperatures of the environment (air) and water causes reflex cardiac arrest. And if a person is immersed in water, and he has a cardiac arrest, all reflexes are “cut down” in him, including the respiratory one, and the person drowns.

And the fourth, most common risk for life on the water is when not only children, teenagers, but also adults behave irresponsibly towards others while swimming. As happened in Kazan, when a girl swimming nearby died due to the carelessness of a teenager.

“I myself had a case: I swam under water in a sports pool, swam to its edge and began to turn back, and then suddenly some plump girl falls on top of me, who jumped into the water with a screech from the side,” said Leonid Ostapenko. – It’s good that she hit me in the shoulder, there was a strong bruise. And if in the cervical vertebrae? Then it is not known how it would all end.

– How dangerous is the bungee with which they jump into the water?

– The bungee just excludes the possibility of technical entry into the water. A person is brought down as God puts on his soul.

At the moment of separation from the bungee, a person does not control himself, and then – a few moments of free flight, during which there is practically no opportunity to turn around. In addition, the jumper does not control what is under him at the time of splashdown. Therefore, in places of such water fun, you need to exercise maximum caution, both on the part of divers and other swimmers, and it is better to leave such places altogether.

– There are cases when surface bungee tugs are torn, – in turn, added the adviser to the chairman of the executive committee of Rossoyuzspas Vladimir Fedorovich. – Most often, tragedies happen precisely because the bungee ropes are clumsily made, these are not professional ropes. Secondly, such homemade products cannot be calculated by weight, height of those who ride them, by depth and height, everything is done “by eye”. And third, they have unreliable mounts. In addition to the fact that a person can be injured when falling, he can slip out not when he flies up, but when the “reverse motion” begins, and the device starts to drag him back, and in this case he can also be injured.