Warning: Don’t Use This Mattress as Flotation Device
Gotta love this headline: “Man, kids swept to sea on mattress.”
Last week one of the crazier headlines (remotely related to my field) covered a wild rescue: a 35-year-old man and his two kids–one aged 11 and the other 12–were picked up more than a mile off shore in Australia, clinging to life on a mattress! They had been paddling along the shoreline off a bay looking for junk (or maybe treasure) when the tide dragged them out.
Okay, so now you’re wondering just how in God’s name a mattress can float for so long. Well, when I read more about this bizarre story, I learned it was an inflatable mattress, which had sprung a leak. Oops. I guess mattresses don’t make for good rafts. But allegedly it did last for an hour and a half after it got a hole–just in time for the Coast Guard to show up and snap these hapless souls out of the water. Good thing, too. The water in this area is cold and they had no life jackets. They were treated for mild hypothermia but suffered no injuries.
I have no idea what inspired the man to encourage these kids to hop aboard their magic watercarpet. I wonder if these pre-teens scratched their heads at the thought of launching a mattress into the ocean. I certainly don’t want to pass too much judgment because they may not have had access to any other “flotation device,” but they certainly learned a lesson the hard way. Maybe they will go into boat-building now that they have some more sense (hopefully).
And maybe we should add yet one more disclaimer to inflatable mattresses: NOT a flotation device!
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