“New Zealand has one of the highest drowning toll amongst O.E.C.D countries.”
In the last 20 years 945 people have drowned in New Zealand river’s. Here is what they were doing. – Road vehicle 246 – immersion accidents (e.g. falling from a bank) 208 – swimming 101 – crossing rivers 57 – rafting and tubing 50 – boating (including jet boating rowing craft and dinghies) 30 – diving/jumping 26 – canoeing 23 – fishing 20 – rescuing others 16 – other 150. Rivers are easily the most dangerous water environments and this is backed up by the statistics that more people drown in rivers (66%) than swimming pools, at the beach or in the ocean. The reason river’s are so dangerous is because of there unpredictability. A river’s speed and depth can change in a matter of minutes making them very hard to cross so not surprisingly 80% of drownings when people are trying to cross a river occur during a flood. This shows that people underestimate the amount of power a river current has. Did you know that if you are standing next to a knee deep river 10 metres wide flowing at walking pace, that about seven cubic metres of water will be flowing past you each second. A cubic meter of water weights about a tonne so that seven tonnes per second. Imagine trying to stop the weight of four elephants each second.
For a country with a population of our size New Zealand has a massive amount of coastline. New Zealand has the same amount of coastline as the United States of America but its population is 301,139,947 compared to New Zealand’s population of only 4,115,771 this is proven by every New Zealand lives inside two and a half hours from the ocean. This means that New Zealand has a lot more of coast that is unprotected and watch by surf life savers. This is because since we are only a small nation we can’t afford to have people patrol areas that aren’t populated by enough people to make it worthy to have a resource that we are already short of. But in America because of there...