Patrol hours to stay

By Richard Payne

Shellharbour City Council is expected to pass a motion at its next meeting allowing for the provision of a new lifeguard at the southern end of Warilla Beach as the controversy surrounding local patrolling hours continues.

With tonnes of sand having been dumped at the southern end of the popular Warilla Beach after the opening of Lake Illawarra, Shellharbour City Council operations and services director Arthur Webster believes another lifeguard is warranted as the area again flourishes with swimmers.

However with five of the region’s beaches already patrolled during the summer holidays, Mr Webster did not believe there was a need to extend current patrol hours saying council was constantly monitoring the busiest periods of beach usage.

“We have found that the best hours of operation are generally from 9 until 5,” Mr Webster said. “Just because it’s nice it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are stacks of people on the beach.

“We look at the average times people are using the beach and in the school holidays this is during the middle parts of the day.

“It is just a matter of council remaining vigilant to attendance trends and running our services to meet demands, which is why we are recommending another service be put down at south Warilla which has become more popular lately.”

With the average Shellharbour Surf life Saving (SLS) patrol volunteer spending around 45 hours a summer at the beach, Club President Rob McAllister could not justify an increase in hours.

Already under pressure from SLS state centre to begin the patrolling season earlier and finish later, Mr McAllister said he believed the current patrol hours were more than adequate, saying it was a very rare occasion to be called out to perform a rescue after the beach was closed for the night.

“Generally in summer the nor’ eastern comes in around 3pm which is a bit uncomfortable and sends a lot of people home,” he said. “We’re lucky in that we have around 110 patrolling members but that still means most people are patrolling around once every three weeks.

“To ask the smaller clubs to do even more than that is a bit much. It is a volunteer organisation and a lot of our members are extremely busy yet they are still giving up a lot of their weekends.

“We don’t want to push people away because we are asking them to do too much needless work.”