How not to drown

Daniel F. Moore, Ph.D.

When you think of a dam, you usually think of large features such as the Hoover Dam, but smaller dams known as lowhead dams are also very common. Lowhead dams, also known as weirs, are generally no more than ten feet high and can be as low as six inches. Lowhead dams allow wafer to move over the top of the entire dam freely. Most lowhead dams were built for irrigation to mills or served as early hydroelectric generators. On rivers nowadays, most are abandoned and no longer used. Because of their workings, lowhead dams often cause hydraulic jumps to form. These features in a river are also referred to as drowning machines. As the water comes over the top of the dam, it crashes into the water at the bottom of the drop, creating a deep current pulling everything, for example a boater or kayaker on the river, under the water. As the person comes back up, the next cycle of water hits and a constant churning is created that keeps them below the water. In fact, these features are often marked on the banks with signs warning of risking certain death. Public safety agencies have an interest in understanding and carrying out tests in drowning machines. The less time a drowning person spends in the jump, the better chance of survival and understanding techniques for decreasing that time is important for public safety agencies. In aiding them, Gioia and colleagues have examined the factors that influence the residence time in drowning machines. They have used a combination of theory and experiments with buoyant objects (spherical balls, but also confirmed with non-spherical objects) to study the relationship between the time that a buoyant object spends in the feature to the features of the jump and of the buoyant object. First, Gioia et al develop a semiempirical formula relating the period of the churning in the jump to the Froude number of the water flow, where the Froude number is the ratio of the velocity of the wafer to the square root of the product of the depth and g, the gravitational acceleration. With this, they find a linear relationship where the faster the water coming into the jump, the greater the period of churning in the jump. The next factor studied was the dependence of the probability that the object will escape the jump to the relative density of the object to the water. Here, they find that very light objects are much less likely to escape the jump than objects that are barely buoyant. The findings suggest that the notion that a life preserver can significantly delay escape from a drowning machine cannot be reconciled. However, more studies are suggested in which participants are instructed to curl into a fetal position (thereby

increasing their density) or remaining passive (and not fighting the downward pull of the jump, where there is a greater chance of escape).