Park Point beach party for water safety awareness

Duluth Parks and Recreation hosted a beach party at Park Point Beach House on Wednesday from noon to 3 pm. The beach party was focused on water safety awareness.

“We want to do something like this for the community to give people that opportunity to learn about the hazards of our large body of water here. You know, it is such a big body of water. We do get rip currents. People are at risk. Hypothermia. It’s such a cold lake. It’s not like our inland lakes in Minnesota here,” said Recreation Specialist Megan Lidd. “It’s great to be able to have this opportunity to do some outreach, promote those aspects of water safety, and also just have some fun with it, too. So we’ve got some games, we’ve got trivia. The Minnesota Department of Health is here as well, talking about waterborne illnesses.”

Families of all ages came out to have fun at the beach while learning about various components of water safety, from rip currents to life jackets. 

“ A lot of people think water. Dangerous currents and big waves,” said Duluth YMCA Risk Manager Cheryl Podtburg. “There’s also a lot of other things to consider. Even just the sun and the U.V. index, as well as different E coli warnings and things. So there’s a lot of different components to water safety. And there’s more than one thing that you should consider, not just should I wear a life jacket? And is a lake warm enough today?”

This was the first of three Park Point beach parties. The others will be on July 28 and August 10, both from noon to three. 

“The more that’s repetition for folks, the more that they’re just going to have that inherent knowledge for themselves so that they’re ever in a risky situation,” said Lidd. “They just know what to do or can advise people on what to do. So we hope that never happens. But just the more information everyone has, the better.”